Steve Dotto here.
Glad you could join me today.
Today, let’s take a look at two things that you absolutely have to add to your Gmail account.
Why do you have to add them?
One, because they will save you time.
Two, because they will save you embarrassment.
They are both important aspects, wouldn’t you say?
Within Gmail, we have a feature.
If you go into the Settings, we have an area that they call their Labs, which you find
if you take a look along all the different settings actually within the Gmail Settings
down.
There’s an awful lot of kind of backend settings that are available to us.
This one here is one that people quite often don’t bother going into and taking a look
at but it is full of rich resources that can make your life a wee bit better.
Now there are two that I’m going to tell you about today.
I’m going to tell you about Canned Responses and I’m also going to tell you about one
called Undo Send.
Now what the Labs tools are, these are little extensions that you can build into Gmail to
make it work more effectively for you, to add some extra capabilities that aren’t
built into it natively.
As I said, we’re going to look at Canned Responses and we’re going to take a look
at Undo Send.
But if you take a look through this menu, you’ll find lots of different ideas and
it may kind of get the old synapses firing to determine that.
There might be some other things that you could do.
For example, you can add a Google Calendar gadget.
You can add different types of search capabilities.
What are some of the ones that I use?
You can tell which ones I’ve enabled because they’re clicked Enabled.
You can incorporate Google Voice into mail—I’m going to try that once, maybe in a future
demo—enabling the Preview Pane so you can have a Preview Pane much like Outlook would
have within Gmail.
I might try that out as well.
I think there was a reason I had to turn that one off though.
I think one of the other extensions that I have turned on will break it.
That’s one of the things you always have to be careful with whenever you’re using
these Labs things.
The reason they are called Labs is that they aren’t fully tested.
In some cases, they will break depending on what other extensions you have installed.
But these ones I’m going to show you today, for the most part they’re pretty solid.
I haven’t had any issues with them.
What you do is you go into the Labs as we’ve done here and then you click Enable on the
different tools that you want to have enabled within your version of Gmail.
I’ve enabled Undo Send and I’ve enabled Canned Responses.
Let me show you how they both work.
Let’s go back into the Inbox and take a look at it.
Now the first feature I’m going to show you is Undo Send.
This can save your bacon.
It’s an unbelievably useful feature to add to Gmail.
The key is you have to remember that you have it and not panic when you need it.
What am I talking about?
Panic in email?
Let me show you.
We’ve all done this.
I’m going to reply to a little email message from my buddy, Robert.
We’re trying to put together some sort of a meeting and a time.
I’m going to down to the bottom here I’m going to say Robert and then I’m going to
say more stuff, and then I’m going to quickly read it as we always do but never really think
about it, then go Send.
Now you’re going to have to watch the process because it’s going to happen very fast.
I click send and then I immediately have sender’s remorse.
Oh crap, I didn’t want to send that.
I can click Undo and I have this buffer period of 5, 6, or 7 seconds during which the moment
you have sender’s remorse, it allows you to stop it before it goes.
Now this doesn’t allow an email that you’ve sent, once it’s actually gotten out into
the system, to be recalled.
This is different than recall.
What Gmail does is it buffers it.
It gives you a few seconds to think about it and then it sends it.
So in that grace period that you have between clicking Send and then going oh, I spelled
that wrong or realized that just as that email window closes, you see a typo, you see a double
capital letter, you see something or you suddenly remembered wait a minute, there’s something
wrong with that, that allows you that grace period to click Undo Send.
What it does is it takes you into the draft folder.
See what it’s done?
It turned that email from an email that’s sent into a draft email so that you can go
back in, you can make the changes you need, and correct whatever it is that you have to
correct.
I’m going to scroll all the way down.
This is a long email thread.
You go down to the very bottom, you can correct whatever it is you have to correct, and then
you can then send it.
That gives you, as I say, that grace period which is just totally awesome.
That saves you a lot of embarrassment occasionally.
It’s a good thing.
The other feature that I wanted to show you is the Canned Responses.
Canned Responses can save you time, not necessarily save you embarrassment in this particular
case.
They can save you a lot of time.
I’m here in a response window for an email and very often, we have the same thing that
we want to send people on a repeating basis.
It could be our address.
It could be the text of a press release.
In my case, when I book guests on the radio show, I typically have to give them all the
logistical information, the phone number of the studio, the address of the studio and
that sort of stuff.
So instead of having to type that out each time, a lot of times people will create a
document.
They will copy and paste that repeating text from that document.
For those of you on a Mac who’ve watched some of my other videos, you might use a tool
like TextExpander which allows us to auto-fill a lot of different text strings.
For the rest of us, a free option is Canned Responses in Gmail.
It only works in Gmail but they work really nicely.
They appear in the bottom of your Compose window.
Under More Options, you click Canned Responses and there it brings up all the different options
that you have.
Now there are two fields that you have to really pay attention to.
The first is Insert and the second is Save so you really have to make sure you notice
the difference because sometimes I’ve noticed as I create the canned responses that I’ve
managed to mess up my responses by choosing the wrong field.
Let me show you.
If I wanted to just insert the details of my bio—let’s say that I’m doing a speaking
engagement for somebody and they want a quick bio from me—I just click Steve Bio and there’s
my bio all ready to go.
Look at that.
Isn’t that great?
It’s really quick and easy for me to send it.
I edit it once, I paste it in here, and then I’ve got it.
Now how you create canned responses is equally easy but this is where you can run into a
little bit of a challenge.
If we go into Canned Response and we go Save, if I save it here as Radio Details or Steve
Bio right now, it will overwrite whatever the file is.
So if I’ve made an edit here and I have to change this and add in the bio, “For
15 years, Steve was the host and executive producer of—” I’m going to say “Canada’s
most popular.”
I’ve made a change to that, subtle change but I’ve changed it.
Now when I go into Canned Responses, I’m going to save it here under Save.
It’s asking I want to overwrite that existing response.
Now if I delete it and I go back to Canned Responses, I choose the Steve Bio, it’s
got most popular.
So you see how I’ve edited and changed it.
I also create new ones I the exact same way.
So once you’ve written something that you might want to use again, just save it here
as a canned response and then you could use it over and over again.
That will save you a lot of time.
That’s our double-ended theme today, saving you time using Canned Responses, a free Lab
item from Google Labs in Gmail, and saving you massive embarrassment by allowing you
to recall an email immediately after you send it when you experience a bout of sender’s
remorse, also in the Labs area in Gmail.
I hope you found this useful today.
Drop by our website at DottoTech.com and there you could check on our podcasts.
We do a podcast each week where we talk about how technology fits in our lives.
I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
[END OF VIDEO 2 Gmail Ninja Tips 8:43]