The Google Basics Series, Part 1: How to Create a Google Account

- This is the first of a five-part series on the Google ecosystem. What a big word, ecosystem, what does it mean? It's just talking about your Google account and the benefits you get from working with Google, and how all their different products work together. That's the ecosystem, their products being Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, those sorts of things. But there's a few different types of accounts that you can get, which causes massive confusion even to me, so I thought we would start this five-part series out by talking about your Google account, how to set it up, what to expect from it, and what benefits you get from joining the ecosystem. That's today, on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day? At Dotto Tech, we make technology easy, so you can do more. Now, today, I am biting off something which I consider to be a little bit big to chew. It's the whole idea of Google accounts, and the reason it's big to chew is Google has, for some unknown reason, they've given us basically four tiers of accounts that we can have. Two of them are free, two of them we pay for, they're all slightly different, but they're all incredibly similar, and it just gets a little bit confusing. So my goal today is for you to understand the basic of how the different four type of accounts work, and also how to set up your free basic account and understand what the benefits are of that, to set the stage for the rest of this series, what we're gonna look at, using Gmail and using Google Calendar, the basics, using Google Photos and how all of the different tools integrate with each other and fit together. Thereby, we will all have a wonderful image and a wonderful picture of how the Google ecosystem works. Sound like a deal? All right, let's begin with the four types of accounts. I'm gonna stick 'em up here, or here, I'm not too sure. I'll have to edit it later to know what side I'm putting it on. But the four types of accounts are a Gmail account, that's an account that has @gmail.com at the end that most of us have and is for free, we'll be talking a lot about that in this series. There's also a Google account, which is the same thing except you don't have a Gmail address attached to it and you can't use Gmail, but you can access the rest of the Google ecosystem from it. Then there's the GSuite account, the GSuite Basic and the GSuite Business account, which gives you access to the GSuite, or the Google Suite. And it gives you access to the exact same things, to the word processor and the spreadsheet and Gmail and Google Contacts and Google Calendar, but you pay $5 a month for the basic version or $10 a month for the more expensive version, and there's just a few subtle differences. The main difference being with the GSuite account, you can have your own email address that runs through Gmail. So basically you can use all of Gmail's search and archiving and sending and filtering tools, but you can use it with your own domain name at the end and you have a few other features as well as some additional storage. Now, we'll put a link in the description below to the, to a page that will give you an outline, to this page here, which gives you an outline of all of the different services available through the Business and the Basic account. But for our purposes today, we're gonna concentrate on the Basic account, not the GSuite basic, but the basic Gmail account, the one that we get for free, the one that so many people have, the kind of key to all of the Google ecosystem. Because with this account, you can gain access to the entire world that Google has to offer, and it's free. But you wanna set it up properly, you wanna make sure that your security's in place, and most importantly, I think you wanna understand what the benefits are, exactly what you can get from this account, which is our goal in this episode today. So let's now take a look at setting up a Gmail account and what the benefits are and how that fits in the entire Google ecosystem. Now, it has been a while since I've signed up for a fresh and brand new Gmail account, so there might be a few things that I have to puzzle out as we set this up, but we'll go on this journey together, shall we? So you go to any Google page, to your Google country page, or Google search page, and you go to Sign In, and in the Sign In area, when you go to sign into your account, if you already have an existing account, of course, you can sign in. But if you don't, you can click on Create Account. And you create an account by entering your name and a username. Now, that's gonna be a bit of a challenge, obviously, because so many millions of people already have Gmail accounts that you're probably gonna end up with some sort of numerical appendage to your name or something that makes it unique. But I'm gonna set us up, I'm gonna set me up right here, I'm gonna set up a brand new one with my name and username. Hmm, thinking of a good username. This is always one of the hardest parts, what do I want? I know what I'm gonna do. There it is, because I know I've got a Dottotechdemo Gmail account that I've set up, so I'm gonna make Dottotechdemo3, I'm pretty sure I can get that. Then you wanna set up a password. Now, you can set up a temporary password if you want, or you can set up a nice cryptic password right off the stop. Right off the stop? Right off the top. Now, I have a tool installed call LastPass, which will generate a nice cryptic password for me, so I'm gonna get it to do that. I'm gonna get it to generate a new password for me. Now, the cool thing about LastPass is when you create a new password, it will automatically save it into the vault, so now I don't have to remember that super cryptic password that it created. Now, this is the start. We've got the beginning of the process, so they've approved this name. If the name was taken, they would've stopped us at that point there and told us we have to have a different Gmail name or different name for a Gmail account, but it worked. So the next thing we have to do is we're gonna start entering our security information, because we want our account to be secure, we want to be able to be the authorized person to get into it, and also if we have an issue with it, we want to be able to recover information about the account, and typically speaking, we do that through the use of this, through our smartphone. By adding our phone number to our account, this will allow Google to communicate with us to our phone, which only we should have, theoretically, and it allows an additional level of security. So I'm gonna enter my phone number in. And you can also, at this point, enter a recovery email address. This is an existing email address that you already have. If you don't have an email address, I think you can still sign up, oh yeah, it says it's optional. But it's always a good idea to have a backup email address that it sends things to if you have any security issues. Now we're gonna put in our birthday, and they never say happy birthday to me. They forget my birthday every year. Thus not my best friend. And my gender. Rather not say, or custom. Oh, they've added custom, that's nice. I don't mind being identified as male, and then when we, why we ask for this information. Oh, they give us here, they give us, Google, very sensitive, of course, to privacy and security. They have kind of, they try to give us full disclosure every step of the way. So you can read all of the different disclaimers as you go along. Now, the next thing in this process is they want to make sure the phone number is mine, that I indeed am the person with this phone. So they're going to send a text to my phone, here, which we will see buzz in just a moment. There it is, right there, it's already there. And my Google verification code, see, is right there, and it is 605602. And I don't worry about saying this, because it's only a one-time code. There we go. Get more from our number, now it's gonna start to talk to us a little bit how it manages our security. If you like, you can add your phone number to your account to use across Google services. So it's only used this now for this verification, it hasn't actually saved our phone number. If I want to use the phone to receive video calls and messages, or to make Google services, including ads, more relevant to me, I can choose to use our phone, and here's more options. Don't add my number, add my account for security only, add my number for account security and video calls, but don't use my number for any other Google services. So video calls are something new that they've added fairly recently to the Google services, so if we want, we can use it that way. Or yes, I'll add my number right across. I'm gonna go in full into the deep end of the pool, I wanna take advantage of every service offered, and I can always go in and change them later if I want. See, it says you can always change your number, control how it's used, or remove it from your Google account. I'm gonna say okay to everything. I'm in for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. Okay, now we have to accept our terms of service, and here are all of the different terms which we can look our way through. I'm not gonna spend all of the time on that today, but you should definitely read through your terms of service and make sure you're comfortable, and if you're not comfortable with it, Google it and see exactly to understand the subtleties of what's happening. All right, once we've done that, we've set up the basic service. It looks like we're actually in, and it's brought me now back to the home page, to the main Google search page, so if I click here on Gmail right now, it should, if I'm not mistaken, take me into my main Google interface. My Gmail interface, it's loading. This is the first time that this account has been opened as a Gmail account. And there it is. Welcome, Steve, to Gmail. And this is the startup screen for a virgin account, never been used email. So this is where it all starts. Now, so I am actually going to be going through Gmail in the next video in this series. So there'll be a playlist link to the next video at the end of this video, unless you're watching this video when it's just being released, in which case, it'll be released within the next few days, so make sure that you've subscribed to the channel so you get access to the next video. But they're telling us right here that we're 10% set up, that we want to go through these different things in order to set up our Gmail account. So I will talk about these items in the next video, setting up your Gmail account and making sure that you're well-set to use Gmail. But I, as I promised, I said I want to show you the basic setup today, talk to you a little bit about security, and also about how the different Google system, all the different pieces of the puzzle fit together. And that's what I'm gonna show you right now. So we'll get to the rest of the email in the next video, but for now, I'm gonna show you the rest of the Google ecosystem that I've been talking about. And we can find most of it by clicking here under Google Apps, so even before we've completely configured our Gmail account, we have access already to all of these different services, look at them here, that are available to us. Our account, which I'll take you in in a moment, and that's what we set up additional security and we manage our privacy, Search, Maps, Google Maps, which you can use either as an account or you can use it anonymously as well. YouTube, if you wanna set up a YouTube channel, you can use your Gmail account, your Google account, to set up your YouTube channel. Google Play is the store where we download free apps or paid apps for our smartphone or for our computer. Google News, which is an online news service, we actually did a video on using Google News which filters news for you and it uses your account to identify what news is most relevant to you and then serve you that news, so we will do a link to that video here as well. Gmail here, as we're talking about. Google Contacts, which keeps all of our different phone numbers and email addresses all in one place, which we can use on our phone as well as in Gmail, and I'll be showing you more on that when we talk about the Gmail side. Ah, now we're getting into the exciting stuff. Google Drive. I'm gonna click on that right now, because Google Drive is all of the different extra office tools that are built into Google. Now, along with our Gmail account, we get 15 gigabytes of storage available to us, which can be used for Gmail, it could be used for, we can save files, we can use it for just storing files, but we can also use it for managing all of our different documents that we have, and we can create those documents in Google Drive. So you see here as I'm setting it up it tells me right away, you've got 15 gigabytes free for photos, documents, and more. So this Google Drive we will be doing, that'll be, I guess the third video in this series will be on Google Drive, on how we use it. But it does two things for us. Google Drive allows us to store files, but it also allows us to compose different pieces of content. It allows us to, let me just finish off this thing here, and let's get started, here we go. It also allows us to do things like creating, under Google Docs, creating word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and slideshows. Now, we have videos on all of these topics, but we'll be talking about basically how we use these services in the rest of this series. This is a huge benefit that's attached to your Google account or to your Gmail account. I use Google Docs for all of my word processing. For years and years, I used Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Now I use Google Docs and Google Sheets, for the most part, for all of my spreadsheets and all of my writing. It's that good a service, and it's all available to us for free. Plus, there are even more services. We also have forms and drawings and all sorts of additional apps that we can have access to, plus we can load more in. So that's a big part of that Google ecosystem that I was talking about, is access to storage, and documents, all through Google Drive. But there's more, oh yes, there is so much more. There's also Google Calendar, which we can use for all of our organization, and the beauty of a cloud-based calendar means that the same Google calendar lives on our phone as lives on our desktop, so as we're organizing and structuring our lives and all of our appointments, we have an online calendar which works in all aspects. Now, one of the challenges with online calendars is often we have access to a calendar through our phone. So if we're using, say, an iPhone, we have access to Apple's calendar on the phone, but then when we go onto our computer, if we're not using an Apple computer, if we haven't got it configured properly, the computer doesn't always jive with the phone. That's why I like to use Google Calendar across all of my platforms, because I know it's the one calendar that I can gain access to on every device that I have, and it's included for free as a part of the Google account, so that's another benefit of your account. We'll skip by Google+, because that was their social networking fiasco. We also have access to storing all of our photos online. Any photos you take on your camera or with your phone can be synced to Google Photos, and again, it's a benefit of the system. And Google Photos in itself is, I think, one of the best benefits of using the whole Google system. So Google photos is attached. And then below, we see there are even other tools and we can add more apps as we go along, things like, what do we got here, Google Books, where you can manage all of your books. Google Keep, which is a simple notebook tool, which compares, it's not as robust as a tool like Evernote but it's very flexible and very simple for us to use. And all of these other tools available, plus we can add more. That gives you an idea of the breadth of tools that are available to us just by creating that Gmail account or that Google account, and all of this is free. Well, if it's free, Steve, okay, then let's talk a little bit about our security and privacy. So you go into the Account setting, and this is a place that when you first set up your account you should spend some time looking at and going through. So here we've got managing our sign-in and security and our personal information and privacy, and then all of our account preferences. Now, we'll be diving into this a little bit more throughout this series, and we've got other videos that we will link to as well for things like doing two-factor authentication, which we can set up for as far as our sign-in and security, and also talking about how Google deals with our privacy and personal information. But this dashboard that they have here, under your account, is a really important area to get familiar with, because here you can choose how to, well, we'll start with sign-in. Here you can choose how to sign into your Google account, and two-factor authentication is what I recommend you set up, because that basically uses your smartphone so that nobody can hack into your account, or it's incredibly difficult for somebody to hack into your account. You have an extra level of security and privacy set up there. So going through each of these different steps, which we actually have videos on most of them as well, but getting familiar with the account settings is crucial, and you never have to worry when you're in Google. A lot of people, I think, get lost in the Google system and they say, oh, I don't know where to go to get to my accounts, I don't know where to go. This little series of nine dots here under the Google apps that's available whenever you're in any Google property is your key. Right in here, you've got access to this account settings at all times. You also have access here to your Gmail, to jump quickly back to your Gmail, or, watch it as soon as it loads, we will see that the nine dots appear again, or the Google Apps appear again, and we can click here, and now we can go into our contacts or we can go into Google Drive. That's your main navigation point as you go through all of the different Google tools. So we've done a lot. We've actually covered a lot, I think, in this first little video. I hope that it's been clear to you, and you now have the confidence to step forward and maybe create a Google account and start to recognize some of the benefits that are attached, and if you do, then you're gonna want to make sure that you watch the rest of the videos in this series as we go through Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs or Google Drive, Google Photos, we'll be talking about all of those different main tools through the rest of this beginner series. Now, make sure that you have subscribed to this channel so you don't miss anything here on Dotto Tech, and ring that notification bell to make sure that you are notified when we upload new videos. And now check out the rest of our videos here in this series and others. Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.