A Blog for Senior Citizens by a senior citizen. Most posts are written by me and others are relevant news items. Emphasis on India. As posts could be made in quick succession, please see the Index (Archive) to see earlier ones. If you comment I won't lament.
When you receive an email
invite for an event like seminar, conference, meeting etc nowadays it is mostly
online like webinar. The platform on which my associates conduct the meeting
are CISCO, Zoom or Google Meet. The invites arrive in all formats comprising of
text, images or pdf attachments. Some are sent well in advance requiring
reminders. I am also involved in conducting such online events, playing the
host on zoom and google meet. Such meetings are on behalf of Senior Citizens
Associations where I am a member or office bearer.
Earlier there was a good
facility of creating a calendar event directly from the email. Gmail used to
intelligently transfer data about the event to the calendar in suitable fields
like title, time, venue, description etc. I find this missing now. There IS an
option called create an event on the top menu in the Gmail. But it is highly
truncated. It just opens a blank ‘create events’ window where you need to
manually enter all the data. If the
invite has an image or pdf part then you are lost, almost. The event creation
page does not recognize requirements of webinars, like URLs, password, Meeting
ID etc.
In the Calendar, when you
create an event, you are the owner. There is a provision to change ownership to
the person organizing it but that guy may not be a Google account holder. In
fact, even if you create an event by yourself for an event owned by you, invite
can not be seen by all as all may not be on google.
If I want to enter details of
forthcoming events that I come to know, just to make an entry like an entry in
my diary for keeping track of them through automatic remainders this is not
easy. You should remember not to email the invite to others. Making monthly
calendar view – showing all dates in a month at a glance - as default, there seems
to be no provision in Settings.
Google is well known for
withdrawing or simply stopping currently available facilities products and
services. For example, when you get a
video attachment in an email, earlier, you could simply click on the attachment
link to open and watch the video. Now in ‘New Gmail’ you have to download the
video, save it in your disk and open it again to view it. Expecting a better
integration is a far cry. I have not studied MS Edge / MS Mail / MS Calendar
integration yet. But too many systems in use will spoil your efficiency. So, I
dare not try a slew of MS products under Windows 10.
However, what you may do in
such a situation might be:
1 1 To STAR the message with different colors to look into it later 2To mark it unread 3.To create a task and set a time for reminding you 4.To snooze it and put off to take up at some point later 5.Do all or many of these in combination.
Despite knowing and doing
many of the above things, some important messages may slip out and remain
unanswered. When I detect an important message requiring certain specific
response action (example: send a story
or write an article for press or seminar), I send a quick “canned reply”requesting the sender to kindly remind me by
such and such date. Gmail is very useful
in composing several standard templates / replies that you may just pick up and
include in your reply. Most importantly you may avoid postponing replies by
quickly resorting to short responses auto-suggested by Gmail itself, wherever
feasible or meaningful.
I mentioned a number of
options above. Which is your preferred way and why?
You can snooze any message in
Inbox, if you wish to take action on it at a later time.
In the inbox listing of
messages any message can be selected and snoozed. There are options to put off
taking action till the next day or to weekend (Sunday) or to next week (beginning)
Monday. Or you can choose a date and time to ‘wake up’ using the calendar. On
the appointed day the message pending action is shown at the top of inbox.
Snoozing is a valuable tool.
Earlier I used to mark messages with different colour stars. This was confusing
as you do not keep updating / changing the colour of stars.
Unfortunately this snooze
option is available only in New Gmail.
I am a member of a discussion
group where I get a quiz / game to solve every day. It could be mathematical
question or a language based problem. Members are supposed to send answers to
quiz master directly before the end of the day. Answers along with details of
members who participated are announced next morning. Here snoozing works
brilliantly.
There is a snooze label on
the left column adjacent to message listing along with Inbox Drafts etc. Here
you will see all snoozed items. You can open and act upon any of them thus
pre-empting snoozing till specified period. It is like cancelling a timer
before the due/end time.
A picture of snooze option
setting is shown below
If you come across any
special uses of snooze as compared to google keep please let me know.
Gmail offers another fantastic facility: Automatic Translation of an incoming message into a language of your choice. Some seventeen languages are supported presently.
Languages that may be translated include: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.If the message that you get is in any of these languages you may have it translated into any one of the other languages. Therefore this facility will benefit millions of Gmail users across the globe.
You do not even need to know which language the message is in when it arrives. For instance I got a message in a foreign language about which I had no clue at all. In seconds I got translated into English and THEN I learnt the translation was from Chinese!
When Gmail detects one of your messages is in a language other than your default language, you'll see a header at the top of the message. Click the link that says Translate message to.... Your message will be translated inline (no need to open a new tab or window). Or if you want to translate the message and print it too, you can click the down arrow next to the Reply button and select Translate and print.
Most interesting option is that you can also translate an entire conversation – complete set of messages having same subject or thread as it known. Just click the globe icon on the right side of the conversation and you're good to go.
If you'd like to change the language your messages are translated to (let's say it prompts you to translate a Chinese message to English, but you'd prefer to read it in Swedish), just click the Change language link in the header and select your preferred language and select your preferred language, or go directly to the Settings page and change the setting for your 'Default translation language.' If you'd like to turn off message translation, click Settings and deselect the checkbox next to 'Enable message translation.' All these are accessible via Labs module in Gmail settings.
The day is not far off when Indian Languages will also get added to the list. If this should happen the key point is to promote commerce via these languages – enough services and products being sold via Indian language websites.
Gmail offers a new feature in Labs. You can view YouTube, Picasa, Flickr or Yelp links right inside Gmail. You don't have to do a cut and paste of the link that you get in your message. Gmail understands and allows you to view the video in the message itself. No need to open the link in another window or as a new tab. This is a great facility saving time.
In the case of Picasa the photos or pictures themselves are shown.Only thing that we can not use immediately in India is the YELP Reviews. Yelp provides ratings of US restaurants based on user reviews. When you are discussing setting up a meeting in a restaurant, YELP review is picked up from the URL you send and it is available (Address Phone Ratings etc) in the message itself.
Gmail has already integrated several things like Events or Documents earlier. When a message speaks about a forthcoming event, there is a provision to create an event in the calendar quickly and automatically. Minor editing may be needed. Similarly entire message content can be quickly converted into a Google Document by the click of a key. You may see appropriate links on the right side column. I have noticed that when a message contains many events Gmail fails to sense it as an Event.
With all these improvements introduced day by day most users will be so much addicted to Gmail that they may give up other email systems slowly.
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Dr P Vyasamoorthy, 30 Gruhalakshmi Colony, Secunderabad 500015 Ph 27846631 / 9490804278
