Use Text Replacement on Your iPhone/iPad to Speed Up Typing

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I use Text Replacement on my iPhone and iPad to speed up my typing. 

I can type pretty quickly on my iPad, but I’m absolutely hopeless on the iPhone.  Let’s just say that rely on autocorrect, A LOT.  On iOS devices, your typing speed is necessarily restricted because you have to take the time to switch keyboards for numbers and special characters.  AND there are some things that you have to type ALL THE TIME that require those characters. For these frequently used, but slightly complicated terms, I use iOS’s Text Replacement. 

Text Replacement is a feature that allows you to substitute a predetermined string of characters for a frequently used term or phrase.  For example, we all have to type our email addresses a ton.  We type it every time we fill out a form, make a purchase, or log into a website. That is a lot. Email addresses have an annoying @ sign, so it takes a little longer to type due to keyboard switching and is prone to error (particularly if you are me). Here’s what I do:

Go into Settings, then General, then choose Keyboards, and Text Replacement. Now you will notice that iOS has some default replacements built in. That means that if you type “omw”, your phone will replace it with “On My Way!”  So, you can see all of my replacements here.  By the way, these sync between devices through iCloud, so whatever you put in on your phone will also be available on your iPad. 

Let me show you the replacement that I use for my email address.  The shortcut I’ve chosen is “lll” — this is not a phrase I ever use, which makes it perfect for this use. So, every time I need to type in my email address, I type lll and iOS changes it to larahammock@gmail.com once I spacebar away from it. I have a couple of email addresses, so I have a shortcut for each.  For my yahoo email address, which I use for online purchases and junk mail, I use “ly”, which automatically changes to larahammock@yahoo.com.  Just having a shortcut for email addresses is spectacular, but you can use it for any other frequent use or complicated phrase. I’ll share a couple of other ways I use this:

• I type “add:” for the first line of my address
• I use a row of asterisks to separate sections while I’m writing sometimes, but unlike a computer keyboard you can’t just hold down the key to get multiple asterisks. Instead, you have to hit the key each time, so I made a shortcut: 5 asterisks in a row give me 30 asterisks. 
• When I make comments in a document or to an email that has a number of questions directed at me, rather than reiterate or retype the question I’m responding to, I like to just imbed my comments in the original email with my initials. In fact, I like to bracket my whole comment. This is a pain in the rear to do on a phone — switch keyboards twice for each bracket and hit caps for each initial plus another (and different) keyboard change for the colon!  So, I just type my initials in lowercase lwh and voila!  Now I just move the cursor to enter my comment. 
• On recipes I abbreviate “Salt and Pepper” to S&P, but with all of the keyboard changes, it’s practically easier to just type it out.  So, I created a shortcut of s.p (all on the same keyboard) to get “S&P”. 

Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!