Alfred's Best Features for the Independent Business Owner

Running a business, whether on your own or with a small but (im)perfectly formed team, involves so many different responsibilities; sales and support, business management, blogging and social media, and the dreaded accounting tasks.

While Alfred can't do bookkeeping for you (shucks!), he can help simplify many of your repetitive tasks.

Most of these features require the Powerpack; You can purchase a Powerpack license here or upgrade your license from a previous version here.

Snippets and Text Expansion

One of the most common repetitive tasks is in typing the same text or looking up the same links over and over again.

By creating snippets, you can carefully craft your response to a frequently asked question, and paste it with a few characters next time.

Examples of useful snippets could include:

• Your business postal and email address
• FAQs about your products
• Commonly used website and social media links
• Today's date, using a dynamic placeholder
• Pre-defined text followed by your clipboard's current content, using the {clipboard} placeholder

We all have individual routines; This week, pay attention to anything you're writing more than once and turn it into a snippet!

Clipboard History

The Clipboard goes hand in hand with snippets; It's another brilliant way to save time and quickly find text, images and files you've copied within recently.

You'll first need to enable the Clipboard History feature, as Alfred doesn't automatically begin saving your clipboard content.

When you copy some text using ⌘ + C, Alfred will add it to the clipboard. Later on, you can pop up the Clipboard Viewer to grab an item you copied earlier.

Pro tip: You can use ⌘ + S to turn a text item in your Clipboard Viewer into a new snippet for safekeeping!

Calculator, Dictionary & Contacts

These three features barely need an introduction, as they're so simple to use, but it bears repeating as they're very handy and quick to adopt.

Start typing a calculation into Alfred; Press equal to complete your equation, and Return to copy the result to your clipboard.

Need help finding the right words? The macOS Dictionary app is right there at your fingertips. Use the keyword "define" to check the definition of a word, or "spell" for the spelling of words.

And finally, your Contacts can be accessed by typing the name of your contact and pressing Return, which will show you all the essential details in the Contacts Viewer. You can then quickly choose their email address to start writing an email, copy their phone number to your clipboard, or open their address in the Maps app.

Custom searches

Are there sites you search frequently, such as supplier websites, your own website's documentation, or shared wikis?

With a custom search, you can type the keyword for the site followed by your search term, and press Return to launch the results page.

Take a look at our Guide for creating your own custom searches or pop by Alfred's preferences under Features > Web Search to get started.

You can easily share your custom searches to help your colleagues and friends save time too!

Workflows: The Ultimate Productivity Boosters

Workflows give you supreme control over your Mac; You can import workflows created by community members, or create your own to suit your needs specifically.

One of the easiest workflows to adopt is the File Filter, which allows you to filter the file search on your Mac to only include certain file types or locations.

Take a look at the examples built into Alfred or join the Alfred community forum for help in creating your own dream workflows.

There's so much more to discover!

There are many more features that can help boost your productivity, like the File Buffer, many more workflow types, System commands and so much more.

When you browse the Powerpack preferences, click the question mark icon in the top right corner of the preference pane, which will take you to the relevant help page for that particular feature. It's a great way to discover and try out new features!

Once you've discovered your favourite features, share them with your colleagues for a more efficient super-powered team.