TextExpander Usage Statistics

Who doesn’t love a good stat? Complete vanity but we all like to see numbers getting larger and charts! In this post, I’m going to be talking about TextExpander stats.

TextExpander is a productivity tool that lets you replace small snippets of text you write with their replacement. For example, when I type ddate TextExpander replaces it with today’s date. e.g. 2019-07-17.

I have a TextExpander review you can read if you’re interested.

If you’ve been using TextExpander for any length of time, you know the little “Statistics” button in the macOS app.

Clicking “Statistics” pops up the last year’s worth of usage stats:

• Number of snippets expanded
• Hours saved
• Characters saved

Every so often out of curiosity, I would view these stats, to see if I’m getting my money’s worth (I always am).

TextExpander is more than the macOS app, however, and I regularly use the Chrome plugin, and the iOS apps as part of my day to day working.

From testing these stats, I can see that neither the iOS app or the Chrome plugin update the statistics in the macOS app.

I thought this was a bit of a bummer, I don’t like stats that don’t show the whole picture, and even though I use the Mac app way more than the other two, it would be good to see these in one place.

Enter the web app

You might not know, I didn’t for a long time, but TextExpander has a statistics page against your account when you log into their web app.

You can find it at https://app.textexpander.com/settings/statistics/overview.

It can show you the stats for the last 30 days and appears to take into consideration the snippets expanded via the Chrome plugin, and from the mobile app.

The disconnect isn’t great

The web app isn’t a like for like with the Mac app, and the table they produce below the monthly chart seems to miss some days.

Hopefully, this is something TextExpander improves over time. There is potential to do awesome stuff with the usage statistics they have.

At the very least, it would be awesome to have one source of truth that listed:

• All-time usage
• Rolling year/month usage
• Most used snippets

It is all vanity, though, so we can’t complain too much!

My Stats

If you’re interested, this year I have:

• Expanded 6000 snippets
• Saving me typing 618,876 characters
• Which has saved me ~30 hours of typing at my normal typing speed

I don’t consider myself a particularly heavy user of TextExpander, so I think that is pretty impressive!