Have you ever found yourself typing some of the same things over and over again in your emails? Names, addresses, phone numbers, and URLs are all common in messages, and can sometimes be a pain to type repeatedly. Or maybe there are certain long words or phrases you really like to use, but you’re so pressed for time that those extra keystrokes will make you late for your 10:00 meeting. Have no fear, Mac OS X Mail has a built-in feature to cure these woes and have you finishing your email faster than a running (snow) leopard.

The somewhat-hidden Text Substitution feature works well for just about anything. And it’s preloaded with some special characters to get you started. Here’s how to enable Text Substitution:

Open a new message and right-click anywhere in the body.
Highlight Substitutions in the popup menu, then click on Text Replacement to activate the feature.

That’s it! Now let’s enter in your custom text.
Again, right-click anywhere in the body of a new message.
Highlight Substitutions again, but this time click on Show Substitutions.

A small window will pop up with a few buttons and check boxes. Click the box that says Text Preferences.

From here, press the plus sign in the lower left order to add your new shortcuts.

For this example, I used the shortcut “pn” to write out our office’s main phone number.

Helpful hint: if you want to create a shortcut for a multi-line phrase like this:
“Thanks,
Your Name”
simply hold down the Alt/Option key while pressing Return to insert the line break.

Once you’ve entered in all your shortcuts, close the window and go back to Mail to test them out.

And just like that, you have some easy, customized shortcuts to make your email-writing lives easier. Enjoy!