VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
“Hey. This week we are covering the five top features to know about when switching from Outlook to Gmail.
Hi everybody, Fintan Murphy here from Damson Cloud. This week I’m covering the top five features that you should know about if you’re switching from Outlook. This is something that we cover with users all the time. We have transitioned hundreds and hundreds of companies over from Microsoft Outlook over to G Suite or Gmail. And it’s a big challenge for users, particularly if they’ve been using Microsoft Outlook for a long time. So I wanna cover these top five features that I think will help you for this transition and make it a little bit smoother.
Number one is the preview pane. Now, for Microsoft Outlook users, you’re familiar with the preview pane. It’s something that’s enabled by default. So when you first open Gmail, it might look a little bit scary because the preview pane that you’ve been using for maybe ten or 15 years isn’t there. But don’t worry, it does exist in Gmail; you just need to turn the feature on. You go into settings, into advanced settings, and enable the preview pane. Once you’ve enabled the preview pane, some additional settings will appear. This will enable you to decide whether you want it to be horizontal, whether you want it to be vertical, or whether you want the emails that you select on the preview pane to be read immediately or after a few seconds.
So that’s the first feature. The second feature is snippets, Google’s solution to the preview pane, where it gives you a little snippet of your email, the first line. And for a lot of Gmail users, this is really, really valuable. But if you’re using the preview pane and if you’re an Outlook user, we often get the complaint that it makes Gmail look very busy. So if you’d like to disable this feature, you can go into the settings, into General, and scroll down to the bottom and disable snippets, and it will start to make your Gmail experience look a little bit more like Outlook and a little bit more familiar for you, and maybe a little bit cleaner.
The third feature is display density, and display density is up at the top right-hand corner. If you click on the little cog, you’ll see display density there in the drop-down menu, and it allows you to decide the type of view that you have over your Gmail. There’s default, there’s comfortable, and there’s compact. Many outlook users will prefer the comfortable or compact because it will squeeze up the emails. And again, when you’ve cleaned up the snippets and enabled the preview pane, this is making your email or Gmail look a little bit more like Outlook, a little bit more familiar to you.
Number four and five kinda go together because you need to enable number four before you can actually use the fifth one. Number four is keyboard shortcuts, and this is something that I think people should enable irrelevant of whether they come from an Outlook environment because I think the keyboard shortcuts are fantastic. The first thing we’re going to do is go up into our cog and into our settings. We’re gonna go to keyboard shortcuts and enable those in our general settings. And then we’re going to go to advance settings and we’re going to enable custom keyboard shortcuts. And the reason I’m gonna get you to do this is for two reasons. One is that it allows you to see what all of the keyboard shortcuts are, because it’s difficult to remember them all, and so it gives you a full list. And number two, it allows you to customize them. So if you don’t like the keyboard shortcut that Google has chosen for the particular action, you can actually change it, which is fantastic.
Now, number five in my list is actually full screen compose in a new tab, which you can only do via a keyboard shortcut. Now that your keyboard shortcuts are enabled, when you’re back in your inbox and you click D, it will open up the compose a new email in a new tab, and it allows you to compose an email while still leaving your inbox separate. There are other ways to full screen your compose window, but I find this one probably one of the quickest.
That’s it for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s short update. If there are any particular features that you found in Gmail useful when switching from Outlook, please let us know in the comments below. Thanks very much. See you next week.”
