It’s always challenging to learn your way into a new software tool.
You know how the old application behaves – its shortcuts and folders.
The new application might confound your expectations, with different models of behaviour^^.
At PRACE, we are now using the google-owned gmail to send and receive messages in-house**. And while using the PRACE gmail account to send messages, you may be interested in the more experimental side of things.
Did you know you can set up a default text styling, for example?
That you can have your text looking a particular way in each message you send, without having to re-format every time…?
(more after the break)
Jill from Carlton was asking me how to do this, and i had no idea. But a quick google search brought up several pages, including these:
- via about dot com
- via worldstart
..telling me that it’s a gmail “labs” thing, called “enable Default Text Styling in Gmail“.
Here’s how you do it.
1) First go into gmail settings, the “labs” tab.
2) enable gmail labs thing (settings > labs)
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This adds an extra section to your gmail settings > general tab.
3) change your default (now in settings > general)
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What else have you found in the gmail “labs” settings? Anything to share with your colleagues here?
Please add a comment with anything you’ve discovered, or anything you’d like to know. Perhaps we can help.
Notes:
Many accounts allow you to pretend to send from the gmail PRACE account (my fastmail email account allows me to send from my @prace.vic.edu.au account, for example. But fastmail is pretty special. Not everyone can do that.)
^^Different email behaviour: Gmail binds messages together as “conversations”, so you can see how the back-and-forth messages have progressed. I like it, but not everybody does. And it’s different from what you expect.
Photo by ntr23 (creative commons at flickr). Thanks dude.
It takes a forensic investigator like yourself to discover this one! Sometimes I think that Google screen designs are so nerdy, they are designed for the IT elite…