Using Placeholders

What Are Placeholders?

Placeholders are like variables in your snippet—like fill in the blanks. You use placeholders in your snippet when you have part of a text or paragraph that is different each time you use it. For example, you may have an e-mail that starts with Dear (so-and-so), where the text in parenthesis is someone’s name. To learn how to add placeholders to your snippets, read on!

How to Define & Use Placeholders

Within a snippet, use ? and then some text alphanumeric text (without spaces) after the question mark. For example, if you have a snippet where you want to customize the person addressed in an e-mail each time you send it, you might start it like this:

Dear ?name, how are you today?

When you enter the shortcut for this snippet into QuickKey, a second text field will appear, prompting you to enter a name. Type the name you want to use, and then press the enter / return key. For example, if you typed the name John into the QuickKey name prompt field, QuickKey would end up pasting this:

Dear John, how are you today?

Anywhere else in the message where you have the same placeholder, QuickKey will use the same name. For example, if your snippet looked like this:

Dear ?name, how are you today? … It’s always nice to hear from you ?name.

QuickKey will only prompt you for the name once, and automatically replace every instance of the placeholder with the name you enter, such as John, like this:

Dear John, how are you today? … It’s always nice to hear from you John.

In addition, you can also define multiple unique placeholders in a single snippet. You can have up to 5 unique placeholders per snippet. So, you could have snippet text that looks like this:

Dear ?name1, how are you today? I’d like to introduce you to my colleague ?name2, who works in our ?department. ?pronoun will be happy to help you out. Let me know if I can help with anything else ?name1!

Each time you use the above snippet, QuickKey would prompt you for a name1, name2, department and pronoun, and turn it into this:

Dear John, how are you today? I’d like to introduce you to my colleague Susan, who works in our Customer Service Department. She will be happy to help you out. Let me know if I can help with anything else John!

As you can see, placeholders are a powerful way to customize your snippets.