From the course: Gmail Essential Training

Change themes and use the sidebar - Gmail Tutorial

From the course: Gmail Essential Training

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Change themes and use the sidebar

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at this sidebar all the way on the right hand side. With one click, you can access your Calendar, Google Keep, which is a note-taking app by Google, Tasks, your Contacts, and you can also add other Add-ons directly to the sidebar. Let's click on the Calendar icon. In one click, it's going to open up a little popup window to which you can navigate through your calendar day. When you're on today's date, this little red line will tell you what the current time of day is. I can see the current date, and if I click on the down arrow, I can go back and forth through future or past dates and select one. At any time, click Today to go back to today's date. I can even add a new calendar appointment right from here. I can either click in a time slot or click and drag to create a longer appointment. I'll add my text, fill in any other details, and click Save. A really neat thing about this Calendar sidebar is if I have a particular email open, let's open up this one, I can click and sign a particular time slot to create an event, and it's automatically going to fill it in right from that email, so it is possible to create calendar entries directly from emails. I can either leave this pane open and go back to working on my Inbox, and I can get back to my Inbox by clicking this arrow on the top left hand side, but I'm going to close out of the pane by clicking the X on the top right hand side of the Calendar pane. From here, let's go into Google Keep, which is a note-taking app. It can include text lists, images, even audio recordings. I'll click Take a note and start typing. I can give it a title, though I don't have to, and I'll click Done. Here's my note, and now I'll click the X again. Now let's go into Tasks. Google also comes with a complete Task List for me to use. I can click inside, Add a task, start typing and add other details. I can put in a date and time, and if I click on these three dots, I can even add subtasks to this task. Again, I'll click the X to close out of it. Now, I can also get into my Contacts, but we'll be going into that later. So, for now, and finally, I'm going to click Get add-ons. This is where I can browse the Google Workspace Marketplace to view some add-ons that I can put into the sidebar. Some are free, some cost money, but I can go through and browse for something that looks interesting or useful to me. For example, there's Trello Add-ons, Box, I know there is a Dropbox for Gmail. I can click on this. So, you can go through, view some screenshots, see if it's something that's going to help you, and when you're ready to use it, click the Install button. I'll click the X to close out of this. If I decide I don't want to use the sidebar at all, I can click this arrow way down here on the bottom right hand side of the screen, and it's going to hide it completely so I don't even have to look at it. In fact, I'm going to hide it for this course just to give us some more room to view everything that we're going to go over. And here's the arrow again. I can always click it and bring it back. The last thing we can do to change the way Gmail looks is to change the theme. This is just something fun that Gmail gave to us, but I want to show you, because we all need some fun now and then. I'll click the gear icon, and if I scroll down, I can see Themes. I'll click View all. It's going to let me browse a theme library. It can let me choose an image. I can even choose a solid color. When I find one that I like, I can click on it, and it's going to change the way Gmail looks. We'll update the background. Now, it doesn't change the body of the email, so you'll see that you will still be able to read your email clearly. It's just a border around it that gets the picture. If I like that, I can click Save, otherwise I can go back to the Default theme at any time by scrolling and choosing Default. I'll click Save again on this one, and that's how you can use the sidebar and customize the way Gmail looks.

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