Last week I wrote an article about the benefits of using Gmail over Outlook as an email exchange platform. http://www.onsitehelper.com/blog/103-gmail-benefits-over-outlook It is understandable that people can be a little uneasy about the thought of moving away from an email platform they are familiar with, such as Outlook, to a newer more versatile platform such as Gmail. Sometimes the drawing to use the old platform is so great that people go back to using Outlook. The good news is that Gmail can be setup for users with the same layout and feel as Outlook. How? It only takes a few steps. 1. Migrate using GASMO (Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook) If you are new to Google Apps and have all your history emails in outlook, it is best you upload them to Google to making tracking old emails easy. Further, it will allow you to track these emails via your mobile phone. If you don’t require your emails uploaded, you may still want other items in Outlook to appear in Gmail such as your calendar and contacts. You can run the GASMO tool and select to only upload these items. Its important to have all the same information you had in Outlook in Gmail. You dont want to have to open Outlook to get something once you move to Gmail. You can download the GASMO tool from here https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync 2. Disable Conversation View A common frustration of users coming from older versions of Outlook (2007 or earlier) is that Gmail groups messages together based on the subject line of the email. So after a few correspondences the email gets quite long and can be a little tricky to follow the conversation if you’re not use to Gmail. So we can turn this feature off so your emails will be separate again. a. Login to Gmail b. Click the Settings gear icon in top right hand corner. c. Click settings d. Scroll down the page a little and look for Conversation View: Select Conversation view off e. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click save changes 3. Enable the Preview Pane The Preview Pane in Gmail is the same as Outlook where you can preview the contents of the email once you have selected it. This makes Gmail really look and feel like Outlook. a. Click the Settings gear icon in top right hand corner. b. Click settings c. Click the Labs tab at the top of the bar d. In the search bar, type on preview pane e. Click Enable for Preview Pane f. Click Save g. Back in your inbox there will be a small new icon next to the page navigation. When you click this icon you can chose if you want the preview pane to appear on the right or below your inbox. 4. Use of Labels Gmail labels are similar to folders in Outlook. You can drag and drop emails from your inbox into your label in Gmail. It is a good way to clean up your inbox. If you don’t have all the same labels in Gmail as the folders in Outlook then you may want to run the GASMO email migration tool which will create all the folders with emails in them the same as Outlook. One great feature of Gmail labels over Outlook folders is that you can have multiple labels on the one email. For example, if I sent you an email and you had an Adrian label as well as an IT label, you may want to find my email on both labels. You can simply drag the Adrian and IT label to the email and you will see the email in both labels. If you would like more information on how to use Gmail in the way you use Outlook, feel free to send us your query at [email protected] or call us on 03 9999 3106.