Adding content snippets

Who can use this feature

Supported on Team and Enterprise plans
Only admins can edit snippets. Team members can only view and use snippets.
Also available in Chrome, Edge, Word, Outlook, Contentful, and Figma.

What's in this article

Introduction
Using snippets
Best practices
Managing, organizing, and downloading snippets
Sharing snippets
FAQs

Introduction

Got text you’re constantly retyping or copy/pasting into your emails, docs, or design files? Turn it into a snippet so you only have to type it once. Snippets are reusable pieces of text that you can create in Writer and insert wherever you’re writing.

Using snippets

To create a snippet, just add your reusable text in the snippets field and create a shortcut. By default, all snippets shortcuts start with a “w.” prefix. This is so you don’t accidentally insert snippets while writing normally. The best shortcuts are 🥁 short. Pick something topical and easy to remember, e.g., if it’s a boilerplate company mission, then pick “w.mission”.

Snippets support rich text formatting – e.g. hyperlinks, lists, bullets, bolding, italics. If you insert a snippet into a text area that doesn’t support rich text formatting, we’ll simply insert it as plain text.

You can insert snippets in one of two ways:

1. Insert via shortcut

Anywhere you are using the Writer Chrome extension, just type your snippet shortcut and you’ll see your snippet appear. Hit Enter or select the card to insert the snippet.

2. Insert by copying to your clipboard from the snippets tab

Head to the snippets tab in your suggestions sidebar. You’ll see all of your Team’s snippets. Just select a snippet to copy it to your clipboard. You can then paste it wherever you need it. The snippets tab exists in every Writer plugin and extension.

Best practices

If you aren't sure how to begin building out your snippets, here are a few common use cases:

Additional context around rules in your style guide: If your team has rules around using bold or italic text, creating a snippet makes it easy to bring up these guidelines wherever you're writing.
Canned emails: If your team has frequently used emails, snippets can serve as templates to standardize and save time.
Legal disclaimers
Boilerplate text
Mission statements
Common error messages

Managing, organizing, and downloading snippets

Using tags

Tags are a great way to keep snippets organized by team or use case.

When you're reading to share and publish your snippets, you can use tags to specify exactly which snippets to publish.

Downloading snippets

Select the download button in the top right corner to download your snippets as a CSV or an XSLX file.

Syncing snippets

Want to reuse the same set of snippets across multiple teams? No problem! You'll need an org admin or a team admin of all of the relevant teams to do this.

Under Admin > Teams find the team you want to sync to another team's snippets and select Edit details.

Expand the Advanced menu.

Under Use another team's snippets, select the team you wish to sync from, then select Update.

Once your snippets are in Writer, it’s easy to build and publish a snippets list in just a few clicks with our style guide feature. Style guides can be password-protected, but don’t require a Writer seat to access them.

In your style guide page builder, select a snippets block . You can either publish all your snippets, or you can publish only specific tags.

Your published snippets will look like this. You’ll be able to filter by snippets tag or search for a specific one.

FAQs

Q: Which Writer plugins and extensions support snippets?

We currently support snippets insertion via shortcuts on the following platforms:

Chrome extension, on most websites

You can also copy snippets to your clipboard from the snippets tab in your sidebar, across all Writer apps and extensions.