Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I'm feeling a tad politically incorrect because today I am going to label things.
I know people say it’s not politically correct to label things but I am going to and you
are going to because we are going to look at labels and filters in Gmail.
We’re also going to discuss notifications in Google calendars and discuss the difference
between Dropbox and Evernote, all of that coming up today on Ask DottoTech.
Ask DottoTech is the show where you ask, I answer.
If you have questions that you’d like me to address, please, please, please enter them
in the YouTube comments or you can drop us an email.
If you’ve signed up for our newsletter, just reply to our newsletter with your question
and I will do my best to answer.
I cannot answer each and every question but I do my best to answer as many as possible.
Today, we are going to start things out with a pair of questions from salv236 and Noah
York who asked me two questions about Gmail which I cleverly combined into a single demo
that we will do.
The first one was he asked if he can create filters with multiple keywords within Gmail
and the second question from Noah York was, how do I get labeled emails to show in my
inbox?
Two questions both relating to Gmail obviously so let’s jump over to Gmail and have a wee
gander at those issues.
The first question was about filters.
Now you have to understand that we have two different kinds there, two different things
we have going on here.
We have email filters which automatically go through and categorize email.
Gmail looks at your email coming in and it creates an action based on the attributes
of that email, who it’s from, what it is, that sort of thing and then it applies a label
to it, moves it to a certain spot, believes that it can do all sorts of things like that.
The second part is the identification for you, the labeling.
We can create labels for all of your different groups of emails so that we can quickly visually
identify what’s happening with the email when it comes into our inbox.
It’s all about increased productivity, folks.
So let us have a wee look.
It all starts right here in the Settings.
If I go into the Settings, I will find there both labels, which we’re not going to deal
with the labels here but instead we’re going to start by dealing with filters.
So the filters are how we create a set of rules that tell an email how to act.
So you can create a new filter from scratch, just by going here and going through and creating
the filters and putting in the different criteria.
One of the things, the question I was asked is can we just create a filter with multiple
keywords?
Right here, you can create the filter with multiple keywords.
So the criteria are who it’s from, who it’s to, the subject, if it’s got the words or
if it doesn’t have certain words in it and then you can add other criteria as well.
It’s kind of labor-intensive though to create a filter here in this dialog box or in this
area here.
Instead, the best place to go to create filters is when you’re in an email of the sort that
you want to have filters.
So if I go into my Promotions tab here—this is my demo account so there’s very little
real email—but if we wanted to say create a filter for all of the DottoTech newsletters
which seems to be the only email that comes to this particular account, what you can do
is you can have the email opened up.
Once it’s opened, you can then under the More tab create Filter messages like these.
So it’s going to now pre-populate the basic information.
It comes from info@DottoTech and then that’s the only criteria that it’s given.
I can choose a subject.
If I have a repeating subject line, I can put that in here.
I can put in if it’s to a certain email address or include the words.
So I'm going to put in Has the words “DottoTech” because I always start out each newsletter
with DottoTech this week.
Once I've got this basic criteria in place, I can click down here at the bottom to say
Create a filter with this search.
So now what’s going to do is when a message arrives with this, what should I do?
This is where we get into the label question.
So I'm going to apply a label and I'm going to choose a label.
But I don’t have any labels created yet because I'm just new to this so I'm going
to create a label that’s called “DottoTech Newsletter.”
So now it will save them all.
Now if I've got multiple different labels already, I can nest them in order.
But I'm just going to create this as one that’s kind of a top level one.
Then I can also add other criteria.
I can forward it to a certain email address.
I can delete it.
I can mark it as important or I can categorize it into different areas here within the pre-defined
categories within Gmail.
I can also—this is a little bit of magic—apply this to all the matching messages.
So when I create this filter now, it’s going to take all of those existing messages and
it’s going to create a filter.
Look here, now I created a brand new area in my side bar which is the DottoTech Newsletters
which has all of those DottoTech newsletters available.
Isn’t that sweet?
Now as far as identifying them now within the inbox, being able to identify them as
having this label, the best way to do that is to actually choose the label color right
from here.
See this little pop-out menu?
This allows me to choose all of these messages and apply a label color to them.
So now when we go back into our inbox, if I'm correct we should have the blue badge
identifying all of these as DottoTech newsletters.
That’s how we create the order and structure, first of all by creating a filter, which applies
the rules, and then creating a label which allows us to see it and identify it visually
or by sorting it ourselves within inbox.
I hope that that answers your questions, guys.
So for sal236 and Noah York, thanks for asking.
I hope that I've answered it to your satisfaction.
Our next question comes from my friend Ivor Greer who asks, “Why do you store everything
in Evernote when you already use Dropbox?”
Here we have again the Evernote conundrum, people not quite understanding how Evernote
fits compared to other services because Evernote is totally unique.
Dropbox is storage.
Dropbox is virtual storage that’s online and it allows me to access files wherever
I am from my mobile device or mainly from different desktop and notebook computers.
It’s great for file sharing but it’s not my digital memory.
It’s not where I store all the little tidbits of information that I put into Evernote.
For example, if we take a look right here, right now I'm working with the little notes
that I clipped from the questions.
This is an Evernote note that has all of my Ask DottoTech questions.
I use Evernote to clip stuff from the web.
I use it to take pictures of receipts and invoices.
I use it for all of my different—any time that there’s a digital asset that I need
to retain, I put it into Evernote.
Dropbox is very, very different.
Dropbox is just like another hard drive that lives on our computer.
Here’s my Dropbox account right here.
You can see that I have a variety of different folders, some of them shared, some of them
not.
But this is just access to files.
I have to create an organizational structure within Dropbox.
Within Evernote when I need to find something, I simply search for it.
I can search within Evernote and I don’t have to worry about saving it as a file, etc.
I just clip it and save it within Evernote and it’s done.
So I don’t know if I've explained it well but Dropbox is just an extension of my local
storage, of my hard drive.
Yes, there are some additional collaborative features and sharing features that Dropbox
enables because the fact that the content is stored on the cloud allows us to create
sharing with co-workers or with other people and also to work collaboratively on documents.
And you can do some of those things within Evernote but it is primarily for files.
Here’s a great example.
These videos that I create, sometimes I'm editing them on this computer.
Sometimes I'm editing them on a different computer.
Here are all of my different assets that I would want to import, things like my opening
music, credits and all of those sorts of things.
I store those in Dropbox so that I can access them regardless of which computer I'm on.
That wouldn’t be appropriate to store them in Evernote because there wouldn’t be a
quick way to get it out but if it’s something that I needed to archive to find later, Evernote
then becomes that solution.
So Dropbox and Evernote are not mutually exclusive.
You don’t decide to use one at the expense of the other.
Dropbox is for file storage and sharing.
Evernote is for everything that I need to gain access to that’s a digital asset at
any time.
I hope that that answers your question, Ivor.
Our final question for this episode of Ask DottoTech comes from Melinda Nazim who asks,
“What’s the best app for using Google Calendar on the Mac desktop so that calendar
reminders pop up?”
I'm not a fan of any real calendar app that’s outside of the Google calendar itself, Melinda.
What I like to do is just to use the Google tools, the Google productivity tools in a
browser instance.
I like to use Gmail in my browser and I like to use Google calendar in the same browser.
I think that that’s the most effective way to use it.
Now as far as giving you reminders and giving you pop-ups and stuff like that, if we go
into the Settings—let’s just jump over into my calendar here and go into the Settings—let
me show you where the Reminder settings are so you can understand what sort of reminders
you have access to and how you manage them because we can do it all right from within
the browser window here.
By the way, I'm running the Chrome browser here on the Mac but it’s exact same if you’re
in Safari.
If you go into your Calendar Settings so going under that gear icon and into Calendar settings,
we go to Calendars and here with each calendar—and guys, you can see I have multiple different
calendars that I have running in my calendar settings—I can go into Edit notifications
and in Edit notifications I can set the different parameters for all of the different types
of notifications that I'm going to receive on my computer or in email.
Look here, event notifications.
By default, notify me via pop-up or email 10 minutes before each event.
So you just set your pop-up reminders right here.
You can go through this and you can also choose how you’re going to do all-day notifications.
You can also choose to be kept up to date by email through new event, changed events,
canceled events, event responses and actually one of my favorites—I don’t have it turned
on but I know a lot of people like it and I think it’s a great idea—receiving the
email at 5:00 in the morning of your agenda for the entire day.
I think that’s a great way to do things.
If you like to see your day at a glance and you don’t necessarily want to open the browser
and you don’t want to be online, just receiving it in your email and being able to read an
email that has your daily agenda is a great way to stay on track.
So as you can see, you have lots of different control about how you receive notifications
from your Gmail calendar right within the browser.
With that, I think we have come to the end of another Ask DottoTech.
Once again, if you do have a question for me, two good ways to ask those questions are
a) enter it here on YouTube in the Comments area.
I respond and check that every day.
If I can answer your question, I will answer it right away.
If not, it might make it on the show.
Some questions we obviously don’t have time to answer.
The other way to ask those questions is if you’ve subscribed to our newsletter, just
reply to the newsletter with your question and I will receive it by email.
Again, I’ll do my best to answer or include it here in the show.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!