Smart Text: Create dynamic text fields to save time for your Team

Are you tired of repeatedly typing out the same email addresses, street addresses, and names within your projects? Wish there was a smarter way to streamline your workflow?

Say hello to Smart Text.

Smart Text is designed to make your life easier by enabling you to swiftly set and reuse frequently used text elements. Whether you’re working solo or collaborating in teams, this feature empowers you to create and customize your designs with the greatest efficiency.

What sets Smart Text apart is its versatility. You have the freedom to create Smart Text at both the Team and User levels, allowing for tailored experiences:

• Team /Brand Smart Text: Ideal for shared information like venue locations, this feature can be accessed and utilized by all members within a team. Say goodbye to the hassle of searching for crucial data every time you design a new project.
• User Smart Text: This level is user-specific, making it perfect for personal details such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more. You’ll have your most-used information at your fingertips, ready to complete fields in templates seamlessly.

How to Create Smart Text in your Templates

There are two parts to ensuring that Smart Text works in your Designs:

• Ensuring that the Smart Text fields have data to pull from; both for Brand/Team text, and User Smart Text, and
• Creating Smart Text Placeholders within your Designs.

We recommend working in that order, so let’s start with creating the Smart Text Fields.

How to create new Brand Smart Text for your Team

You must have Brand Manager role applied to your account in order to manage items within your team’s Brand Kit, which includes Smart Text.

This level of Smart Text is best used for teams with multiple sub-teams and varying brand kits. For example, companies with different divisions and require a separate set of phone numbers, social handles and location data that will be used across multiple team members. Setting the text at the Brand level ensures each user has the same information, and if is required to be updated it can be done once, for all users.

1. Navigate to the Brand Kit, and then Smart Text.
2. Click the + Add Smart Text button at the top right.
3. In the modal that appears, you will need to enter two parts of data for each new field:
   • Smart Text ID: This is the label for the field. Ensure it describes exactly what the field will contain, with keywords, so that it’s easy to find when designing. eg Store-Phone, Store-Email. The ID cannot contain spaces.
   • Smart Text Content: Enter the placeholder content that you would like to appear when this field is added to a design. You can add spaces and punctuation to this field.

How to create new User Smart Text

User Smart Text is managed in the My Uploads tab, in your Workspace.

It is automatically pre-filled with 2 settings that are created from your signup data; user.name and user.email. Both of these fields can be overidden with new text by clicking the blue buttons to the right of those fields.

To add new custom User Smart Text fields:

• Click the + Add Smart Text button at the top right.
• The modal for User text is slightly different to Brand Text, in that each Smart Text ID automatically starts with a user. prefix to clearly identify that the content for these will populate from a user level. Add your text to the two fields:
  • Smart Text ID: This is the label for the field. Ensure it describes exactly what the field will contain, with keywords, so that it’s easy to find when designing. eg user.cell, user.instagram, user.title.
  • Smart Text Content: Enter the placeholder content that you would like to populate when this field is added to a design. You can add spaces and punctuation to this field.

It’s important to note that if you are creating new user Smart Fields to go into Team templates, that you’ll need to advise all your team-mates to create the data in their own accounts that matches the Smart Text ID identically. Further enhancements are coming to the tool to make this easier, along with bulk editing options for our Enterprise users.

Once you have Brand and User level text fields setup, you can maximise automation of your design data by combining both levels of text fields within your design.

Creating Smart Text Placeholders within your Designs

Once you have your Smart IDs setup, you can begin placing your placeholder fields in any designs.

1. On your design page, highlight the text within a standard text box that you’d like to replace.
2. Click the { (left curly bracket key)
3. Any available input fields are listed, and you can click to add the placeholder directly to your design.

You can also add them in via the Quick Input tab:

1. Navigate to the Layers & Inputs tab in the right sidebar and then ‘Quick Input’.
2. Each standard text box in your design will be listed here. You can manage these with various functionality – read more about Input Mode here for changing titles, re-arranging order, and locking. The manner in which you set these up will be reflected in designs when you convert them into team templates, or share with them.
3. Click into the relevant field, and type {
4. Your list of available input fields will appear, and you can select any to create a placeholder.

Smart Text and Text Formatting Tips

There are some considerations with using these new tools for auto-populating templates.

1. Smart Text IDs must match identically between your placeholders, and the data in each users account.
2. Rich text, eg adding different fonts, font sizes, lists and other formatting to a text box is not retained if the content of the box is updated via input mode. However, it is retained if it’s auto-populated.
3. You can set rich text for auto-population via Smart text by adding the content, and styling it on your design page. Then, go to the Input tab, and ‘Lock’ it (via the ellipsis menu). Ensure you have created the text box with enough space to fit any longer data that may populate it by other users with longer names, longer emails, etc.
4. If you’re unsure about lengths of data that could populate into boxes, do not apply restrictions to the sizing of the text box via Text Boundary.

Converting a Design to a Team Template

After you’ve applied your Smart Fields to a Design, you can convert it to a Team Template and it will retain the settings applied to each user that makes a copy of the design, and auto populating with their content, so long as the data is set up in their account.

We recommend communicating a list of fields setup and encouraging them to ‘copy’ the text IDs, to ensure they are 100% identical. Once they have the data within their ‘My Uploads’ Smart Text section, it will auto-populate within any template that they open with these fields.

Help is available

The Easil team is available to help guides teams and Enterprise clients through the options. Reach out to our team via the (?) within the app and we’ll make a time to connect and help!