The Google Basics Series, Part 2: How to Use Gmail

- This is the second video in our series about your Google account. Now, in our first video, we talked about setting up a Google account. Today, it's all about Gmail. The basics of using Gmail, 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 on the show, we are going to be talking about Gmail from quite a basic level. So if you're already an experienced Gmail user, you might find something new in what I am about to teach but chances are you know most of this stuff already. Now, in the last video in this series, we set up a Google account from scratch and now in the second part, we are going to set up our Gmail account within that Google account and the whole goal of this series is for people to understand how the Google ecosystem works, how one application works with another application to add more value to the whole. So now, we're looking at Gmail. Now, I set up a brand new account in the last episode and this was the screen that was left to me when I started to set up Gmail. I came into this and it said, you're 10% through on your setup, Steve. Now, you've got to learn how to use Gmail, set it up for mobile, choose a theme, import contacts and mail, and then change your profile image in order to be 100% set up for Gmail. Well, we're not gonna go through all of these steps with you today. You can obviously, I recommend you go through them all so that you learn the skills. I am gonna take a look at them as we go but then I'm gonna dive in and make sure that I talk to you about what I think are the most important points within Gmail. So let's just quickly buzz through this and I might fast-forward parts of this but let's see what they do as far as learning to use Gmail. They walked me through with this informational screen here that talks me through all of the basic things. Okay, I know how to use Gmail. I'm ready to go to the next thing. Setting up for mobile, get the official Gmail mobile app. Oh, this is interesting. Choose any of the following options to get the right Gmail app for your device. So here it is. You enter your phone number here and they will send you a link to your smartphone or you can scan the QR code or you can visit this on your mobile device. Now, that won't work if you're on iPhone. One of these first two will work on an iPhone, this other one will probably only work if you're on an Android phone but this will allow you to set up on your smartphone Gmail which will be the same account. One of the beauties of a Gmail account is it's a cloud-based service, meaning that all of our all of our transactions are done in the cloud, meaning that the clients or the tools that we use on our computer and on our iPhone are all working off of the same file effectively or off of the same account. So in Gmail, it means that on the computer, we can use a web browser to access all of our Gmail and on our smartphone, we can use the Gmail app which will look identical to the app looks, to how the account looks in our browser. All of our structure is the same, all of our tools are the same, and you set that up by either scanning in the QR code or texting the number to yourself and then launching the setup and then logging in with the same account, then everything is mirrored between the two. That's one of the real beauties of using Gmail. So I'm gonna take a pass on that right now but you can walk through that and do that very easily yourself. And look, we're already 50% through on our set up. Next is choosing a theme. They'll give us different graphic looks to Gmail on our computer and I don't like any of these. I like to leave it at the absolute basic so I'm gonna leave it the way it is and that's another 15% done, thumbs up. Next, if you have contacts that are in Outlook or in Yahoo Mail or in some other account, you can import them all using this next tool. This will be a wizard that will walk us through the process of importing all of your different email addresses and the different phone numbers that you have from your different address books that you have. Now, because there are so many different variables, again, I'm not gonna do that with you right now but you get the idea on how to do that and that's a process that you can work through yourself. Some people never do that, by the way. Some people just start and as they add new email addresses, they build their address book from scratch. It's really your choice. And the final thing to do is to change your profile image. So this is the little image that's gonna appear in your account, in your header, on your different screens. And so, just basically upload a thumbnail image of you and I'll just grab one of my photos here. What photos are there of me? My photos. Okay, and what am I gonna do? I'll upload a photo. I've got a photo on my computer of me. This is so exciting. I know that you're loving this. Mm-hmm. So there, there's the thumbnail photo. And I'm opening it and there's a nice thumbnail photo of me like I'm very happy, very dapper. That was at my nephew's wedding and that picture, select that as my profile picture and now, I've got a profile picture that identifies me as me. That's nice. All right, I'm all set. Now, I'm ready to send and receive email. Okay, let me show you the main areas of Gmail now that we're into it and we've got it set up. Down the left-hand side, here's where we organize all of our email. We've got an inbox that all of our email messages come into and then we can sort those emails into different categories mainly within this section here. So this will change over time as you add some more functionality to Gmail. Along the top are the different Gmail tabs that we have and if I open up the settings, we can configure the inbox and that allows me to select which tabs are available. Now, this is something unique to Gmail, at least set up on, I don't know, maybe four years ago, and it helps you organize your Gmail, your incoming email into stuff which is personal email that your primary email, it's stuff that's social networking-related like notifications from Facebook or Twitter and promotions and others. So this is Google using its powerful search and analytics tools to look at email coming in and try and filter out the junk email and the stuff that's not as relevant and make sure that the email which is most relevant to you ends up in your primary inbox. Now, if you receive a lot of email, this becomes quite a blessing and it's something that a lot of people use. Some people don't appreciate it being pre-sorted for them and filtered, other people appreciate it but it's your choice as to whether or not you're gonna use it. So here in these tabs, you can turn on and off which tabs are available to you by turning on and off these check boxes. And as a reminder, I'm just gonna cancel this. We get to this under the settings. See here you go under settings in Configure Inbox and they tell you what's in each one. In the primary, that's the conversations that they believe are most important. That's person-to-person conversations, emails where you have the direct person's email address in your contact list and you appear to be engaged in an active conversation. Social are anything that's coming from YouTube or from dating sites or from Twitter or from Facebook. If you've got notifications turned on in a social site and there's communications coming, it will end up in the social tab. In the Promotions is when it sees things that where maybe you've signed up for a newsletter for a shopping mall or for a store or for special offers and coupons, that's where the different offers are gonna come through. Updates are coming from pieces of software that you've signed up for that are telling you there's a security update or things like that or where there's notifications or they appear to be notification-related as opposed to sale-related. So it's more informational than promotions. And then Forums are if you're in conversation groups, if you're in discussion groups, if you belong to meetup groups or something like that, those notifications will appear. Now, everyone that you have checked off here will then appear here as a tab as you go along and as you go through, you can turn on and off these tabs if you find that you're not using them, and if you find that a lot of email is appearing in one of the tabs that you think should be in another tab, all you do is you go along is you click on that piece of email and you drag it from one tab to the next and then Google will learn over time that that sort of email, you consider to be classified that way. So this is Google acting as almost like as an administrative assistant filtering your email as you go and these tabs are a big part of the way that Google Mail works or Gmail works. Now, looking at the rest of the screen, of course, when you're in your inbox and you're in your primary tab, all of your email appears here. We're kind of going through the rest of the setup here of the different administrative area. On the top right, these little nine dots that I talked about in the last video as well, this gives you access to the rest of the Google Apps. So if you wanna go into your calendar, if you wanna go into Drive, if you wanna check your Google Contacts and add new people to your address book, all of those up here here under the nine dots. The most important tool in Gmail are the settings. Here when you go into under the gear menu and you go into the settings themselves, this is where you set up all of the different attributes to Gmail and as you become more sophisticated using Gmail, you will go through this area here often to set things up the way you want, to customize it. Now, if you follow our videos on YouTube, we often go into this area to do everything from setting up email filters to setting up the different folders that we have over here on the left-hand side so that we can sort our email, you could add multiple email accounts to this. It'll determine how your email looks as you read your email and if you have additional functionality for doing things like adding canned texts or automatic replies to your email, down below here you'll set up your vacation autoresponder if you happen to be away on holiday and you want an email automatically going to people who send an email to you while you're away on a cruise somewhere, if you wanna set up a signature, all of that appears here in these settings. This will be an area that you will get intimately familiar with over time. But all of that is pretty far down the road. Let me show you the most basic things that you're gonna do in Gmail and that is you're going to send an email. Maybe you're gonna send one to me, [email protected]. So I'm gonna put in my email address. So you can just type in email addresses. There you go. You add a subject and then you can add your copy. Now, the nice thing about, well, not the nice thing. A nice thing about Gmail is they've added a lot of different formatting options to us here where you can incorporate attachments, you can insert links, you can insert graphics, you can even insert little videos if your computer is set up to record video and you can embed that right within the email that you sent. But you sent your email to me and you go through all of the different content, interesting stuff, and when you're ready to send, you click here Send. Now, I'm gonna show you one tip. That's one of the biggest lifesavers that you can have in Gmail. So before I send this, I'm gonna go back into settings just to give you an idea, just to give you an idea of the sophistication and what we have available to us here in Gmail. And down here, let me find it here. It's gonna be Undo Send. See this right here? I'm gonna set this cancellation period to be 10 seconds 'cause what happens is as soon as I send this, sometimes you decide oh, I don't wanna send it. Oh, I need to edit something. Watch what happens. So I've got that set up, I'm gonna go back into my inbox. Oops! Now, when you change, make any changes, I have to remember you have to go down the bottom and save the changes. There we go. Once that's done, we're back in the inbox and oh, just a minute, Steve! Where did that email go you were working on? See, that often happens. You jump out and you jump back into it and you've lost the email. That's okay. See, right here we've got drafts. The email is still in drafts. There it is. I'm gonna open it up and so it's still stored in drafts. It will retain that for you. You don't lose it by jumping out. Just go look in Drafts and you'll find it, and you can send it from here directly. We don't have to move it. We can send it directly from here. But watch what happens when I click Send. Here, I can undo it if I decide, uh-oh, the message is sent, and I've got 10 seconds to call it back if I have senders remorse, if i remember that I forgot to add an attachment or I see a typo just as the screen is closing, all of that you can recall it based on the settings that I set up in the settings of what the Undo Send is. Even though that's not a, maybe something that you're gonna use very often, it gives you an idea of the kind of control that you have and how you should be diving into and learning how to use Gmail as you go along. Now, there are so many other aspects that Gmail has but now you know that you can set up the account, you can go through their own tutorial, and you have a basic understanding of the structure of Gmail. In fact, we have folders down the side where information's gonna be stored, you have the main center section with the tabs, and all of the different and the tabs that will filter email for you automatically, you know where to go into settings to make changes so that your email works the way you want and you know how to get to the other Google aspects through the Google Apps menu. That's the basis of Gmail. Now, there's so much more that you'll learn over time but that's why you're subscribed to this channel, isn't it? In our next video in this series, we're gonna be talking about Google Calendar. Oh, such a fantastic organizational tool. Google Calendar coming up so make sure that you subscribe to this channel or you can check out our other videos here on the side. Till next time, I'm Steve Dotto. Have fun storming a castle!