In this instructional video, Randy Dean – the "Email Sanity Expert" – walks viewers through Gmail’s newly introduced Quick Settings dropdown. He begins by introducing himself and his background in email productivity training. Dean demonstrates how the Quick Settings icon appears in the Gmail inbox and explains its streamlined layout compared to the traditional full settings bar. He explores the display density options (Comfortable vs. Compact), noting personal preferences for eye comfort. Dean then shows how to change the theme, including selecting a custom background image from personal photos, and warns about potential readability issues with certain images. He explains how to access the full settings menu via the "See All Settings" link, emphasizing the importance of mastering filters (advanced search and automation) and Gmail templates, and provides links to his other tutorials and downloadable PDF tip sheets. The video concludes with a call to action to visit his website, subscribe, and request additional productivity resources via email.
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Alright, hello everyone. Yes, I'm doing back-to-back videos today. If you'd like to know a little bit more about my new captain's hat, you'll have to go check out my other video about new tools I found in the Microsoft Outlook search function. I do want to thank my sister for the hat. And what I'd want to do is also share some information for my friends and followers that are utilizing Gmail. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. I'm called the Email Sanity Expert. I've spent the last 15 years or so leading and teaching programs on how to better manage your time, your technology, and of course your email and the related email productivity tools. So let's get in and talk about this. What I want to do is pop out into my Gmail, and I want to go into my inbox and sort of walk you through this process. Now, if you look in the inbox, One of the things that you'll see up here is the settings gear. Many of you are probably familiar and comfortable with the settings gear, and you click on this to open settings. But here's the change right here, right off the bat. They've now got this dropdown called Quick Settings. And what's interesting about the Quick Settings dropdown is that, um, you don't have the full bar of tools across the top like you did previously. Now interestingly, let's take a look at this. Um, they have a couple of different things like Comfortable versus compact. If you'd like more data on your screen, click on compact, and you'll notice that it just condenses things a bit more so you can see a bit more on the single screen. I still like the comfortable because I've sort of got those, uh, slightly older eyes now, and so I'm going to keep it at the comfortable. This is interesting. Down here is theme, and I recommend you click on view all because this is sort of cool. But I will tell you, watch out. I was playing around with a couple of these. It can sort of change the background on your screen The problem is that with a couple of these, it did some goofy things formatting on the screen. So, but I did click on this one, and I just want to sort of show you what happens when you do that. Now that you click this, you can close the theme, and wow, that's pretty. That's very nice. I like that. I might actually keep that. Still a little bit hard to read though, but it's super easy to change back. You can just come back into here and go in and click on your standard theme and bring it back. One of the things that's pretty cool is if you click on View All, I want to show you this, you can actually go down and look at some of your own photos. And so what I could do is come in here, like here's Arches National Park where we did our family vacation a year ago. And so I'm going to click on that, hit Select. First I gotta click on it, then hit Select, and then I'll hit Save, and look what happens to my screen. That's pretty sweet. Like, again, once again, I do think it's a little hard to read some of these though. So you might want to just think about whether for eye sanity you keep it on this. Now, one of the things that I wanted to do is show you that you can get back to your full settings. This quick setting isn't everything. You'll see this is what it gives you right here. You've got some other tools that you can play around with in your quick settings. But if you want to see your full suite of tools like you've probably become accustomed to, just click on See All Settings and that brings up the full list of settings, tabs, and dropdowns that you can use. And obviously, you know, there's a lot of cool capabilities in a lot of these different tabs. If you haven't gone in and done a deep dive on your settings tools and you are a very active Gmail user, there's— this is probably one of the best uses of your time. I would specifically recommend that you get really good at learning how to use your filters, because this is sort of like an advanced search capability. But it also sort of brings in some of the capabilities that you may have used to have if you were a former Outlook user, setting up rules. So not only can it help you with searching stuff, but it can also help you with setting up automations within your software. And I'll actually add a link for you coming at the end of the video here on one of my favorite tools and settings, which is Gmail templates. And I'll give you a link. I just made a video about that not too long ago. So just wanted to share with you once again that new change to the Quick Settings. I'll go back to my inbox. And once again, right here is where it is, the Quick Settings. But here's where you click if you want to get your full suite of tools once again as you become comfortable with. So hopefully this gives you a nice little tip. Let's finish this thing up. Get myself into the right place here. Shift+Fn+F5 to go into full PowerPoint presentation mode. Once again, I'd like to thank you for your time. My name once My name once again is Randy Dean, and if you'd like to learn more about me and my different programs, including streaming programs and webinar options, please go visit my website, randalldean.com. If you like my videos, please go ahead and like this one, maybe subscribe to the channel, maybe turn on your notifications so you can know when new videos are posted. And if you'd like to get a whole series, little bonus productivity PDF tip sheets on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google and Gmail usage, smartphone, tablet usage, send me a quick little email, randy@randalldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I will send you a link to those PDF documents. And some of them even link through to some of my other YouTube tutorial videos, so you can basically do your own little self-study course. Hope you had fun with this. Thanks a lot. Have a good day.
