Once upon a time, Google was just a lonely search engine giant, thriving in the realm of web inquiries but with little else to its name. That’s all changed now: Google has dominated several additional sectors of the web and offline world, including smartphone devices, cloud-based document creation, and – of course – email. Gmail is an astoundingly popular service (although it still falls short of Yahoo Mail in terms of total use), and is especially popular amongst business users. That’s thanks to a number of high-yield productivity tools built into Gmail.
With so many productivity solutions to choose from, Gmail isn’t always “beginner friendly.” That’s why Google representative Paul McDonald recently took the time to recommend the top seven tools to make the most out of email productivity when using Gmail. And here they are, in no particular order.
- Keyboard shortcuts. If you haven’t already enabled keyboard shortcuts, you can pull up a simple help menu by pushing the “?” key. This will allow you to see all the possible commands and let you quickly enable keyboard shortcuts.
- Priority Inbox. Some of us receive a dozen messages a day. Some of us receive hundreds. If you’re part of the latter group, Priority Inbox will help filter out the less important messages – such as newsletters, non-critical informational documents, and so forth.
- Show 100 emails. In the Gmail Settings panel you can change the maximum number of emails from the default 25 to a hefty 100.
- Inbox preview. A Gmail lab that shows your Gmail inbox while Gmail itself is loading.
- Send and archive. Changes your default “send” button so it automatically archives messages as well.
- Auto advance. Automatically opens the next message in your inbox after you’ve sent the previous item.
- Background send. A new feature that lets you move onto other messages while your previous email is sent.
Jen Williams
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