Last week, as I fought with Snow Leopard, I spent a lot of time trying to optimize Gmail for more productivity. In the process, I came across four Labs features that I found to be incredibly useful.
Canned Responses: This Labs feature lets you include canned responses in your messages. However, I discovered it was fantastic for adding different signatures to my emails, depending on which account I was using to send.
Multiple Inboxes: This Labs feature lets you separate out some of your labels into the appearance of separate inboxes. Actually, it just let me see the labels more clearly, but it worked brilliantly. I set up an inbox for my non-profit email account and my writetech.net email account all within another Gmail account. It worked beautifully.
Mark as Read: This is just a nifty Labs item that adds a Mark as Read button to your Gmail toolbar. It’s fantastic and has nothing to do with moving to the cloud. It’s just a useful item.
Google Calendar: This little gadget allowed me to add a snippet of my Google Calendar to the right column beside my mail. It’s a helpful guide to my schedule as I poke through my mail.
Additionally, I installed the Remember the Milk widget just about anywhere I could. I tend to forget everything.
What Gmail Labs settings work for you?
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Other than a bad pun, what is Google’s Appy Holidays? Well, it’s a surprisingly useful collection of their applications themed and ready for the holiday season.
Appy Holidays links you to Google Docs, which has templates for things such as invitations, cards, holiday gift lifts, wish lists, gift tags, address lists, and holiday letters. It also links to your Google Calendar, with no holiday theme, but it does allow you to share appointments for those cookie baking dates and holiday parties you’re attending. Appy Holidays links to Picasa to share and edit your holiday images. Finally, it links to Google Chat’s new video integration. Your relatives aren’t that far away after all.
I found the holiday templates in Google Docs incredibly useful. I’ve been keeping a list of everyone we have to buy for in my head, so a holiday spreadsheet I could easily share with my husband was the perfect solution. Like me, you’re probably familiar with the rest of it, but I like the fact that Google has grouped it so easily in one spot and tied it into the holidays.
KiGoo is a new tool that lets you manage and sync your google calendar with your outlook calendar. The install takes a few minutes but it’s worth it. I have actually been looking for something like this for a little while. Basically it creates another section in your outlook for your KiGoo information and then syncs that with your outlook information.
Here is video tutorial on how to install and use KiGoo
Once you install it you will have access to tips/tricks, tutorials, etc.
KiGoo is an application that was built by Kayxo Insight Technology which offers several other products and downloads for Microsoft Outlook.
Per the KiGoo website:
“KiGoo application uses low access MAPI protocol to natively manage all GCal appointments inside Microsoft Outlook. Kayxo Insight technology enables this capability acting as a bridge between any external API or database and Microsoft Outlook.”
