How to Get Outlook Style Gmail for Enhanced productivity
We all have to agree that the MS Outlook has more features and is more productive than Gmail. One of such time saving features: Mail preview, is a very useful feature and can really be advantageous when used with keyboard shortcuts. You can also use this in order to maintain uniformity between work email that uses desktop outlook and personal web email.
Click the image above to see a larger version
Needless to say, Outlook style Gmail will enhance productivity and also will make you stand apart from crowd. Thanks to Gmail engineers that recently introduced this feature. Let us see how to enable mail preview in Gmail:
Step 1: Go to Gmail Labs from mail settings.
Step 2: Search for Preview Pane in labs.
Step 3: Enable it and save settings.
Step 4: Go back to inbox and look for split icon at top-right corner of mail list as shown in below picture.
Click the image above to see a larger version
Step 5: Select your preference -> Horizontal Split or Vertical Split and you are done.
The specific outlook style keeps mails on one side and content on another. Use this technique along with keyboard shortcuts for a drastic improvement in work speed and productivity. Here are few of my favourite shortcut keys that I use regularly while dealing with emails:
c to compose a new mail
f to forward the selected mail
r to reply
j and k for backward and forward navigation between mails
# to delete selected conversation
e to archive the mail
So, effectively putting in simple terms:
Preview Pane + Keyboard shortcuts = killer productivity.
Try the combination to experience yourself and let us know in comments.
Note:
1) There is a 3 seconds delay in automatic marking a mail as read after previewing it. You can change this time from general tabs of mail settings.
2) This feature works really well with high-resolution screens.
3) You can discover more of these shortcuts by pressing ? key while in inbox or from this official support page.
These tips are great, thank you. Do you know how to create a rule to keep our ticketing software from assigning tickets to out of office messages?
In Outlook you can easily create a rule. In gmail….not so much and it’s very frustrating
Try creating an Out of Office setting that works only for few addresses.
I just started attempting to use Gmail after years of using Outlook. Haven’t been very successfully. I am finding Gmail much more limiting and missing several features that I assumed were default features of any email app. The most baffling is that Gmail does not provide sorting email by subject, sender, size, etc… This seems similar to having an address book that sorts by date/time the contacts where entered, but not sorting by name…
Also I have not (yet) found a simple way to create “rules” to guide or route incoming email to certain folders (labels?). I see the above article about being able to enhance Gmail with features found with Outlook. The listed process may very well work, but wouldn’t it be simpler (and cleaner) to just use Outlook and add a Gmail account to Outlook? This would give you the actual desired features of Outlook versus simulating features in Gmail. I have been pulling my Gmail into Outlook for years, along with mail for other email such as yahoo, msn, Hotmail, etc… Unless I am overlooking something, or until an updated version of Gmail is related, I must remain with Outlook. Does Gmail even have anything similar to rules?
Absolutely agree here. If you are using Outlook for years, you will appreciate the finer details and rich features which are not available with Gmail.
For a casual user, gmail works but if you run your business on email, then Outlook is absolutely necessary.
By the way, you can integrate Gmail to your Outlook application. Not the best way to do things but centainly better.