just an asterisk

It’s a bit of a misnomer actually – rich text doesn’t have anything to do with riches or wealth. In fact, it’s not even the correct name, as Microsoft has sole proprietorship of the term “rich text” so our emails are technically “enriched text” (which probably would have been a better name…)

But anyway…

Here is what is really important:  Gmail has always supported signatures, but they were lame. You could write in plain text and split it into multiple lines. This all changed today when Gmail introduced “rich text” signatures, so I thought I’d walk through what you can do now.

Part 1: Rich is mostly about formatting

To see your signature, go to Settings and then the General tab. You’ll see the signature window about half-way down the page.

As you can see from my screenshot above, rich formatting gives you that toolbar that you’ve seen above your Gmail for so long. Using the simple buttons like bold, italic and underline, you can add basic flourishes. There are also font options, colors and high-lighting for your spicy new signature. One of my favorite additions is that you can insert true links into your emails.  For example, you can put a link to “my site” rather than spelling out the web address of your homepage.

Part 2: Inserting photos

Inserting photos into your signature is now much easier, although it still requires a bit of work. The first step is to click on this little button:

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked for a website where you’ve stored your photo. Yes, I realize that it’s a bit of a pain to have to keep the image online, but as you can see, once you have the link it is very easy to include a photo – even a very stupid one.

When you’re done typing the address, you should see the image appear in the box below the address field (as mine did above). Click OK to finish.

When you’re done with part 1 and/or part 2, don’t forget to save your work! You wouldn’t want to lose it!

Have fun with the new signatures. Feel free to brag about any cool ideas in the comments!
~ab

Published from London – yay jetlag…
Your documents are trapped. Contained within your computer or on a thumb-drive, the copies of your work quickly multiply, especially if you try to share a document or if you work in several locations. Want an example? Let’s say you write a word document on your PC (copy 1). A friend asks you to share it, so you put in a thumb drive (copy 2) and your friend copies onto their computer (copy 3). Not convinced? How about when your friend gives you back the edit (copy 4) in an email (copy 5) which you download to your computer (copy 6)? You’ve now created 6 copies of a document when there were only 2 real transactions – you asked for feedback and you received it. If you were using paper, you’d just pass the paper over and receive the feedback on the same page. Why is it so different and complicated when performed digitally?

Google (as always) feels our pain. Google Docs provides an alternative to the madness of the above scenario. This is software that you don’t have to install (if you were really paying attention it’s a thin client) and if you have a Gmail account, you’re already signed up and ready to go. Your documents are available online; everywhere you have an internet connection. There are three services available in the Docs family and each has good features worth knowing about. Read more »