Lean Office Tip: Learn How to Dramatically Improve Document Creation Efficiency

At Gemba Academy we’re constantly trying to practice what we teach by improving the way we do our daily work.

Our Customer Service team, which is lead by Elaine Cressionnie, receives and sends hundreds of emails each week.

Many of these emails start as a template.

Minitab License Emails

For example, when someone orders a Premium Subscription to our School of Six Sigma they receive a free Minitab 16 license. This means we have to send an email with instructions on how to download Minitab 16 and activate it with a license key.

In the past these templates were stored on Google Drive so any of our Customer Service reps could access them.

Additionally, others that still work on PCs (most of us now use Macs) created MS Outlook templates that could be called up with the few clicks of a mouse.

These improvements were great and definitely made us more efficient… but nothing can beat the next improvement our team stumbled across.

Introducing TextExpander

And that improvement was our introduction to a program called TextExpander (Mac version) or TextExpander Windows (Windows version).

With TextExpander you’re able to create “snippets” that allow you to instantly call up specific templates by typing in a keyboard short cut.

For example, when one of our Customer Service reps needs to send Minitab license info all they have to do is type a shortcut such as ;m. In other words, anytime the shortcut ;m is typed the template they created will appear.

And while this is pretty cool it gets even better.

You see we still have to type the name of the person while also entering the Minitab license key in two different places. This takes time, even if you’re simply copying and pasting.

This is whenTextExpander really shines!

Easy to Use

The best way to demonstrate how this works is with a short video… if you’re reading this via RSS or email you may need to click through to the site in order to watch the video. Feel free to view it in full screen mode by clicking the icon in the lower right corner of the video player.

What do you think?

If you find yourself sending the same sort of email, or creating the same type of document (Word, etc.) again and again and don’t want to have to click through a maze in order to access a template I’d encourage you to give TextExpander a try.

Do you think a tool like this could help you improve your effectiveness? What other tips and tricks do you have that may be similar to TextExpander?

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