Tips For Text Replacements On the iPhone

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using Text Replacements on both your iPhone and your Mac. 

Now text replacements are when you type some characters and they are replaced with others. For instance a very common one people like to use is to be able to type the at symbol twice @@ and it replaces that with your email address. So, after typing to two @ symbols I use Space or Return or some other punctuation and you can see how it replaced it with my email address. You could actually have any text replace any other text. It could be short, like an email address or a word, or it could be really long, like several paragraphs of text. 

You create these by going into the Settings App and then into General. Then go down to Keyboard and then go to Text Replacement. Here you've got the entire list. To create a new one you tap the Plus Button and first you type the phrase that you want there as the result. Then you type the shortcut. You can go back to the list here and you can Edit these. So, for instance, one that is usually there by default is OMW being replaced with On My Way with an exclamation point after it. It is much easier to type those three characters than these three words. 

You can use them to replace words. You can use them to replace URLs. Use it for email addresses. You can even use them for simple little emoji characters, just making it easier to type those rather than switching to the Emoji Keyboard and looking for it there. 

On Mac you have to type some sort of punctuation or space in order for the text replacement to take effect. You don't have to do that on the iPhone. On the iPhone you can type the text replacement and it will appear as a suggestion up here. Usually the only one. Just tap that and it will replace the text. No need to have a space or something that you then have to delete afterwards in some situations. 

But here's a way that the iPhone is at a disadvantage to the Mac. You've got the virtual keyboard here, which means that you have to go to the Number & Symbol Keyboard in order to get to the at @ symbol, say, so it doesn't make sense sometimes to use the same shortcuts there. Instead you may want to consider just using the letters. Of course you want to make sure you use the sequence that you wouldn't normally type. So maybe, for instance, xx or zz or something like that. It doesn't matter if those letters will appear commonly in a word as long as they don't appear as a word by themselves. 

So, for instance, here instead of using the two at@@symbols you may want to consider using something like zz to trigger and then maybe one other letter to define what it is. Like e for email. So now on the iPhone you don't have to shift into any other keyboard to type this. You can do it with the letters that are there. 

In addition to making it easier to type longer phrases on your iPhone you can also use it as a custom Autocorrect. This is particularly useful if you mistype a word. But it is not spelled corrected because you're actually typing a real word. So, for instance, here you would rarely want to type the one word. You probably mean the other one. Now it may not happen to use with regular words but it may happen a lot more with names, especially names that when misspelled spell regular words. Of course just remember just because you create the text replacement doesn't mean it has to be used each time. For instance, here you could see this is about to be replaced with that last example. But you could always choose the leftmost option there to use it just as you typed.

It's important to realize that text replacements sync between your Mac and your iPhone over iCloud. So you can add one on your Mac or add one on your iPhone and it will appear in the other place as well. That's very important to realize because the next disadvantage is that on the iPhone you can't add one that has more than one line. So if I want to add one here and I want the phrase to be more than one line you can't do it. You can type a line here and in some cases you can use, say, Shift and then press Return but it doesn't work here. It doesn't allow you to add one. Not only that, even if you were to type it in another app, like say here in Notes, and you were to Copy it and then you tried to Paste that here, it's going to paste as one line, not multiple lines. There's simply no way to do it. But you can do it on your Mac very easily. You can just type it out in another app like Notes here and just Copy it. Then go to System Settings here on your Mac and then Keyboard is actually found at the top level here. Go to Keyboard and then there's a button for Text Replacement. Then you could add this one here. 

So, for instance, I can make this three characters like that. Really easy to type. Maybe something I need to type a lot. Then notice these two fields are reversed. It's the shortcut first and then the phrase after it. They're named Replaced and With instead. So I'll Paste this in here and you could see how I can use the Up Arrow and it is still on multiple lines. Now I can add it, like that. Now back here on my iPhone I can actually see it here. I can go in and it looks like it's on one line. I'm going to be careful not Edit it on my iPhone because it will remove those Returns there. But, they are remembered and they are used here and inserted as multiple lines of text. So while you can't create multiple lines of text as a text replacement on the iPhone, you can create them on your Mac and then use them on your iPhone.

Another thing you can do on your Mac very easily, but it's actually very difficult to do on the iPhone is have Unicode characters as the phrase. So, for instance, I like to use the little right-facing triangle as a bullet character. It's a Unicode character. Anybody should be able to see it. But try typing it on the iPhone without a special keyboard or just searching on the web for it and copying and pasting. It's hard to do. But on the Mac I can use Control Command Space and then you can see I use it all the time so it is right here. But I could also search for triangle, like the, and it will come up and I can easily insert it as a phrase to be inserted. Then I could define it, say, you, using two B's there for bullet. I could add it here and you can see it's added there. Now I could really easily access this on the iPhone, like that. 

Here's one more thing that you can do on your Mac with Text Replacements that you can't do on the iPhone. That's okay because you only need to do this occasionally. That is to backup your Text Replacements. There's no way to do that on the iPhone. But on the Mac you can select one or a range, or just do Command A to select All, and then Control Click, right click, or two-finger click and you could Export all of your text substitutions, right, or Text Replacements. You can call it whatever you want but it's going to, by default, be named Text Substitutions. It's going to create this Text File here that looks like this that has all of them in it. You also saw there was an Import function too. So if you've got a lot of very valuable text replacements and you want to make sure don't lose those for some reason, you can go in and Export them. Then you can Edit this since it is a text file. So, it might be an easier way to actually add some or to maybe delete all but the ones you need or maybe to create a little file that has some useful ones for other people that you work with. Give it to them and then they can import those in.

So as you can see you get the power out of text replacements not by using them just on your Mac or just on your iPhone. But by using them in both places. They are more useful on the iPhone where it is harder to type. But you have more functionality on your Mac, like being able to add multiple lines and backing them up, so you should actually work with Text Replacements in both places. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.