TextExpander dumb tip: Does this look red to you?

Expand your brand's colours into their respective hex codes

Another super simple one for today - it'll take you 20 seconds. Maybe less.

Use TextExpander to recall the exact colours you use in your logo, stationery and branding.

I've got a couple of snippets :

leftfootred expands to #da251d - the red in my logo
leftfootblue expands to #007cc3 - the blue in my logo

Now. If I'm setting up something online and need the colours to match, or I need to communicate this kind of thing to a designer or someone, I don't need to go digging.  I just position my cursor where my colour code should be entered, type my shortcut/description and bloop...it's there.

What other blindingly simple TextExpander tricks do you have in your arsenal?

TextExpander helps remember key dates

If you're like me, you're constantly having to regurgitate dates when completing government forms and applications for this and that. Birthdays, I mostly have squared away, but miscellaneous dates, such as the date I arrived in Australia or when I became an Aussie, or the date of my divorce(!) are needed with increasing regularity. Most of these dates are difficult to conjure up and mostly end up as a rough guess which has caused me problems from time to time.

Smile's TextExpander helps me remember these by using some super simple snippets.

For me, I use 'd' (for date, duh!) followed by a keyword that represents the event I'm needing to store and recall.

• dcitizenship for the date of my citizenship ceremony
• ddivorce for my divorce date
• darrival for my arrival in Australia
• ...you get the gist.

I've even got a few to remind me of dates for insurance policies, car registration, and birthdates (as opposed to birthDAYS) for the kids. The latter is easy enough to work out, but the snippet saves a few cycles. ;)

Of course, these aren't guaranteed to work everywhere - date pickers on web forms most often handle pasted date formats very poorly - BUT at least you can conjure up the key date quickly somewhere and enter it manually if necessary.

Not a complex snippet, and completely obvious, but a very handy one that's super-simple to set up. Hope it helps.