Create and use snippets

Limits and errors on Mac and Windows

All, the default tab, combines personal and shared snippets. All and Personal create personal snippets unless Share with team is enabled.

Triggers cap at 60 characters without an error. Expansions cap at 4,000 characters including formatting, so the formatted editor’s length/4000 counter can reach the limit before 4,000 visible characters; “This expansion is too long. Please shorten it and try again.” blocks saving until you shorten the text or remove formatting. Plain-text input caps silently.

• Empty or invalid fields: “Please enter a snippet and its expansion”. Triggers containing only punctuation, symbols, or whitespace are rejected.

• Duplicates: Exact, case-sensitive matches against snippets or dictionary entries in the same personal or shared library block creation and renaming: “"{word}" already exists in your personal dictionary” or the team equivalent.

• Similar triggers: Case-only variants save, but triggers differing only in capitalization, punctuation, symbols, or spacing can conflict — change their wording. A 10-second success notice names the first similar trigger; while editing, it appears only after you change the trigger.

Cmd+Enter (Mac) / Ctrl+Enter (Windows) saves additions and edits from Snippet or a plain-text Expansion field, but not inside the formatted editor.

Limits and errors on iOS

Only active or trialing team and business accounts show All/Personal/Team; other accounts have no picker. Creating from All on a team account shows Share with team, which sets the save destination and the list checked for duplicates; editing hides it.

Triggers must be shorter than 60 characters after trimming. Validation keeps the sheet open: “Please enter a snippet” means an empty trigger, “Snippet too long” is checked before an empty expansion, “Please enter a word” means an empty expansion, and “Snippet already exists” means either field matches either field of another snippet in the same personal or team list. A save failure after validation closes the sheet and shows an error alert.

Limits and errors on Android

Only business and enterprise accounts show filter chips, and the + button appears once the list has loaded.

Errors include “Please enter a snippet”, “Please enter an expansion”, and “Snippet is too long (max 60 characters)”; the length limit applies after trimming. “This snippet already exists” and “This is already in your dictionary” block duplicate triggers, and editing skips those checks when the trigger is unchanged apart from capitalization.

Sharing a snippet with your team

Sharing requires sign-in and eligible team or business features with an active or trialing subscription; desktop also allows paying users in teams awaiting their trial.

Without team features, desktop sharing and Add new on the shared tab are disabled, and non-enterprise accounts see a setup banner that opens Settings → Team. Without shared access, the desktop shared list clears locally and only personal snippets expand.

How desktop matches your trigger

Expansions keep their saved casing. A trigger spoken alone ignores capitalization, punctuation, symbols, and spacing — including a trailing period — and outputs exactly the saved expansion.

Inside sentences, capitalization is ignored, adjacent punctuation is allowed, and internal punctuation must match. Triggers cannot touch letters, numbers, or underscores. Possessives expand; triggers inside n’t contractions do not. Non-Latin, emoji-containing, and multi-word triggers work within the field limits.

Only one conflicting trigger expands: the longest match by character count wins across personal and shared snippets, and an identically worded personal trigger beats a shared one. An entry saved with an empty expansion removes its trigger; an empty trigger is ignored.

Plain-text expansions keep literal angle-bracket placeholders, such as “Reply to <name>”, exactly as saved.

Formatted expansions on desktop

The editor supports bold, italic, bulleted and numbered lists, and links; Cmd+K (Mac) / Ctrl+K (Windows) opens the Insert link popup. Paragraphs and line breaks alone stay plain text.

To change an existing link, place the cursor inside it and press Cmd+K / Ctrl+K: the popup opens with the link’s text and URL filled in and a Remove button. Changing the text replaces the whole link text, even if parts of it are formatted differently.

Formatting is kept when you saved formatting and the destination accepts a formatted paste, whether you say the trigger alone or inside a sentence and even when Flow adjusts surrounding capitalization or punctuation; multi-line expansions keep their blank lines and bullet lists.

Formatting falls back to plain text when a snippet is pasted alongside the hyperlink email signature, when the same trigger is used twice in one dictation, or in apps that don’t accept formatted text.

The trigger doesn’t expand

Correct a misspelled trigger using the editing steps above, then:

1. Dictate the complete trigger clearly; stop if its expansion appears.

2. Restart Flow on Mac or Windows if the saved expansion still doesn’t appear. This retries snippet sync, but does not guarantee recovery.

3. Test the trigger again; if it still fails, contact support.

A snippet is missing on another device

Snippets sync across devices signed into the same account.

1. Check that both devices use the same account.

2. Press Esc on desktop to clear selected rows and reveal Refresh.

3. Click Refresh on desktop to update personal and shared snippets, then check the list. Refresh is unavailable while a sync is running.

4. Reopen Snippets on Android, or sign out and back in on iOS, if the snippet is still missing, then check the list again.

Reopening Snippets on Android retries sync unless one is already running; a failed shared refresh leaves previously synced shared snippets unchanged. On Android, retry any add, update, or delete that failed, and choose Retry if you see “Something went wrong. Please try again.”