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Do you want to get more organized with Gmail and Google Calendar?

Well, in this video, I'm going to show you all the clever ways you can use these two apps together. This will help you save time and stay on top of your schedule. Be sure to stick around to the very end because I've got a bonus tip you don't want to miss.

Create an Event from Gmail

Let's get started within our Gmail account and see how we can utilize Google Calendar right here from within our inbox.

So let's say, for example, I've opened up this email, and I need to create a meeting with this particular email or something related to it. The first way that we can incorporate Google Calendar is to come up here and select the "more" option and then select "Create an event."

What this is going to do is open up a new tab with a lot of things already pre-populated for us. You can see right away that the email subject line has been put in the title of this event. If we scroll down a little bit further, we can see that the body of the email is now here within the description.

It has also included the email address of the sender, assuming that we are wanting to create a meeting with that individual. Now, of course, you don't have to keep this sender on here.

Maybe I do want to do something with the body of the email, and I'm probably going to come up here and change the title of the event. Maybe I'm going to say something like "Review this special offer" or something along those lines.

But take special note of your guests down below because you may want to remove the sender or other people who've been included on the email. This way of creating an event is best if you're needing to create a meeting not only related to this particular email but perhaps, more importantly, with the other people who are included on this email.

Create an Event from Gmail

Next, let's look at a second way in which we can create an event within Google Calendar. This time, we can do it without even leaving our Gmail application. Instead of coming up here to the "more" option, we are going to come over here to the side panel and select the calendar.

Now, nothing is going to happen just yet. You can see that I've got my email open here on my main Gmail screen, and I've got a preview of my calendar here on the right-hand side. Now, I can move forward to some other date in the future if I want to. But as soon as I take my mouse and click here at 3:00 PM, what it's going to do is bring over the subject of this particular email.

So again, maybe I want to review this email. Maybe there's something related to ChatGPT that I need to do. I can change the subject line, and it's already highlighted here for me at the very top.

But unlike the first method that we saw, you can see that there are two major differences. Number one, it has not automatically added any guests. So no matter who has sent this or who has been included on this email, they are not going to be pre-populated here.

It's also not going to bring over the description as well. So really, this method is not as handy since it's only going to bring over the subject line. But maybe that's enough to trigger what you need to do with this particular email.

When I'm happy with the date selected and any other options I want to make here, I can simply select "Save." Then here, you can see it has been added to my calendar.

Create a Task from Gmail

Now, that naturally brings us to a third way in which we can bring information over from our email to our calendar, and it may be the most effective one yet. The reason being is that it's probably valuable to link directly to this email if you want to come and review it at a later date and put that on your schedule or maybe time block sometime within your Google Calendar.

For that, what we're going to do is say "add to tasks." Now you're probably thinking, "Well, wait a minute, Scott, tasks is not my calendar, or is it?" Let's jump back to our Google Calendar, and you should know that here in the top right-hand corner, we can switch between two different views. The default is, of course, going to be your calendar, or we can jump into our tasks view because this is where all of our Google tasks live.

Now, any of our tasks that have a due date and/or a time will appear here within our calendar, so that's why I'm including it here as a part of this tutorial. Back in Gmail, I'm going to come up here and select "add to tasks." It's going to open up the side panel here on the right-hand side, just like we saw before. It's going to carry over the email subject line here, which of course I can change and edit.

Down below, you can see that it has linked this email message to this particular task. That is very important and can be very helpful when we go to deal with this within our calendar. The one last thing I'm going to do here is select a date. It's going to be today in this example, and I'm going to say 10:00 AM.

Here, you can see the task we just created appears on our calendar, and we are linked directly back to that message. So, no matter if I archive this message, if I send it and give it a label and put it somewhere over here on the left-hand side, we will still have direct access to this particular email.

Now, if you'd like AI to help you create smart labels right here within Gmail, I recommend that you check out SaneBox with AI technology. SaneBox prioritizes essential messages, saving you hours of time each week. By learning from your behavior, SaneBox will clean up your inbox, get rid of spam, and organize your emails into relevant folders. Best of all, SaneBox works with any email provider. To get started, go to sanebox.com/simpletivity or click the link in the description below.

Email from Calendar Event

Now that you're familiar with the ways in which we can add things to Google Calendar from within Gmail, how about the opposite? How can we make the most of email here within Google Calendar?

Well, let's get started by taking a look at this event here, "Client Consultation." I'm going to go ahead and click on it, and you'll see here at the top, just to the right of both edit and delete, we have a little email icon. So if we select this icon, it's going to open up a new dialog where we can go ahead and create a brand new email.

Now, not just an email from scratch. Of course, it is going to be related to the event which we just clicked on. Starting from the top, we can choose if we want to send a copy of this email to ourselves or not. By default, this will always be checked, but you can come up here and deselect this if you like.

Now, down below, you can see that nothing has been added to the email line. You can either add an email address, or you can search through your Google Contacts by starting to type in a name. In this particular example, I'm just going to go back to the event itself. I have not invited anyone else; that's why when I choose this option, this is blank and ready for me to add an email address.

This is probably most helpful if I want to share some information about this event. Maybe I want to see if a colleague would be interested in attending this event. More than just the subject line, which I can edit, it has brought over the name of the event, but I can choose to edit this and the message area.

You can see down below that the event information will be included in the message, meaning the title of the event, the time and date, and the details of that event will be included within this message. So maybe I'm going to write something like, "Hey, would you like to attend this meeting as well?" or "How should I best prepare for this meeting?"

Whatever the case may be, that's why you may want to use this option even if you haven't invited anyone else to that event.

Email from Calendar Event

Next, let's go over to this event here, the "Quarterly Budget Review," and you'll notice that I have invited a few people. The first thing you'll see is that we don't have the option here at the top of the dialog. Instead, that email icon has been moved down here next to the guest list.

Now, if we select it, we're going to see a very similar dialog with just a slight change here at the top of the screen. Once again, we have this "send copy to me," which will be checked by default, but we also have a couple of other options. Do I want to send this message to everyone, the people who have said yes, and those I'm still awaiting a response from, or am I only sending it to a particular group?

For example, if I uncheck the "Yes" option automatically, it will remove the people who have responded yes. Maybe I just want to ask this person, "Hey, are you still able to join us for this meeting?" You can see if I click "Yes" once again, this person is added back.

Or maybe I'm thinking the other way around. This time, I'm going to deselect the "Awaiting Response" option, and I'm going to ask this person to perhaps do something particular within this meeting, such as preparing an agenda or if they can speak to a specific point. Whatever the case may be, you can choose this option here.

Regardless of how many people you've invited to this particular meeting, it will properly filter it for you. Now, that also doesn't stop you from adding other email addresses or other people to this email. You're not limited to just the people that you've invited to this meeting.

Below, the subject and the message are the same, and yes, once again, all of the event information will be included within this message.

Copy Email Addresses from Event

Now, I'm going to hit cancel in this case, and you'll notice that there's another option that's available to us here relating to email: the ability to copy guest emails. Instead of perhaps sending them an email directly here from within Google Calendar, maybe I need to add everyone here to a thread, or maybe I just need to paste their email addresses in a spreadsheet or some other application.

Here, I can single-click "Copy Guest Emails," and then, of course, I can take that wherever I like. If I do choose to come back here to Gmail, I can hit paste, and now I've got those email addresses here that I can add to perhaps an existing email thread or to a brand new email or any other application on the web.

Email from Calendar Event

An additional way in which we can email people directly from within Google Calendar is if we hover over any of the attendees. For example, maybe I need to send Vanessa an email. Instead of going this route and unchecking things and removing participants, I'm just going to hover my mouse over her name.

Down below, you can see that there's a "Send Email" option. This will still keep me here within Google Calendar but will open up a new dialog box. Now, this email is completely unrelated to the event, so there is no pre-populated subject line. They are not going to be sent anything related to this particular event.

I was just perhaps thinking of Vanessa, or I want to send some information to her, which is unrelated to this meeting. With this option, I can start a brand new email, add my subject line, add my details, and hit send, all without leaving Google Calendar.

Bonus Tip

Last but not least, I want to leave you with a bonus tip. Here at the very bottom of your event, you can see that there's a down arrow. If we click this, we have the opportunity to add a note to an event. This option to add a note is actually available not only to organizers of meetings but also to attendees as well.

In this case, I'm going to select that "Add Note" button, and I've got the opportunity here to change if I am going or not to this meeting. Down below, we can see we have the yes, no, and maybe options. I'm going to leave that one alone, but I can add a note. For example, maybe I'm going to say, "I will bring the cookies to the meeting," something like that. Everyone loves refreshments. I'm going to hit send now because there is a send button. Most of us probably assume that this sends an email to everyone else within the event, but that's actually not true.

If we go and open up this event again, you can see that it's actually added that note below my name: "I will bring the cookies to the meeting." Whether we're viewing it here within this preview mode or if we open up the full mode, you can see that that note will exist here as well.

Now, you can always go and change your note. You can't add additional notes, but I can either click on this to edit the existing note or I can select the X to remove that note completely. This is where those notes will appear.

If you're wanting even more simple ways to get organized and stay productive with Google Tools, why not join me at Streamline Academy? At Streamline Academy, we talk about how we can get the most out of our days and our work lives using Google tools and other applications that work well with Google. You can get started today with your 30-day free trial and join myself and other Google users who are simplifying their day.

Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Are you ready to create a free website with Google sites or perhaps you just need a refresher? Either way? In this video, I'm going to show you everything you need to know to get started with Google Sites. 

Select a Template

Now, first things first, how do we get to Google Sites? Well, you can either do a search for Google Sites or go to sites.google.com and you'll end up on a screen that looks like this. Now, we can either get started with a completely blank slate, a blank site. Just note that this will probably take a lot of additional work because there's nothing here waiting for us. So I often recommend that we get started with a template. Now, Google will present us with about four or five examples here, but I recommend clicking on the template gallery where you can see all of the options available to us.

In this case, I am going to use one of these. I'm going to click on this one called Salon, and this will open up our brand new site with the template items included.

Now, don't worry, we can replace anything here, all of the text, all of the images we can delete and remove, and of course add other elements as well. But at least this gives us a framework. So to get started, I'd recommend that you give your new site a name. In this example, I'm just going to call this one Scott's Shop, something nice and simple. We can always come back and change this later. Just know that this will also change the name here in the upper left-hand corner or wherever the homepage or the title of your website is here.

These do not have to be the same, so we can come over here and change this at a later time. Now, the first thing that we're going to want to do is select our theme and also make sure that you're comfortable navigating around your website. So on the right-hand side, you can see that there are three main tabs: insert, pages, and themes.

Choose a Theme

I'm going to click on themes, and on this tab I can click around on these different thumbnails. So I can click on this one. I can see that the text is maybe a little bit smaller. I can click on this diplomat one, this level, this impression. You've got a number of different ones that you can click on to see what works best for you.

I kind of like this one here. It really sort of stands out to me, but that red is not my color. Well, we can continue to customize that down here as well. Maybe I like this green, but that's still not quite my branding color.

If we come over here to the right, we have the option to put in our own hex code, or we can come here and select our own color as well. So maybe I like this blue, but maybe more of a sort of a Navy purplish blue there as well.

Lastly, you will notice once you've selected a particular theme at the bottom, there is a font style as well, and you will always have three choices to choose from here. So I'm going to choose Frank. Hmm, not so wild, Frank, narrow, not too bad. Maybe that first one is the best. I'm going to go back to capital and choose that one as well.

So if you ever want to go back and forth or try out a new theme, you want to come here to the themes tab.

Add & Edit Pages

Next up, let's work our way backwards. I'm going to come to pages. This is where you can see all of the pages, which it's already included within our template. This is really helpful because most businesses are going to have these types of pages—services, about, testimonials, and contact. If I click on any of them, they're going to bring me directly to that particular page.

For example, if I go to the contact page, this already has some great boilerplate information here, so I can just change the address, add my operating hours—it's already done a lot of the work for me. But let's get comfortable with moving our pages around. Maybe the contact information is the most important to me, so I don't want it to be last here in my menu. All I need to do is click and drag it up and make it second behind my homepage. And maybe I want the About section to be after that as well. I can click and drag that up as well, so you can rearrange your pages any way that you like.

Lastly here, within the pages section, what do we do if we want to remove something or add a new page? You can see here as I hover over any of these pages, I can come over and select the more button. We've got a number of different things that we can choose from here, including the ability to delete that page.

At the very bottom of the screen, you'll see that there is a plus button. When we hover over it, we've got a number of different options available to us, but the main one you'll be using is "new page." If I select this option here, I can add a new page. Maybe I want to offer a deals page where I'm going to include special offers and bonuses. I'm going to click Done. Now we can see that the deals page has been added. I can now come in here and start editing that information.

Upload a Logo

Now, just before we start editing and adding content, we do want to look at one more place, and that is under our settings. The reason being is that there are some important things here that we want to keep in mind. Let's take a quick look at brand images.

Remember, you probably have a logo, and you'd like to include that with your website's name. So here, if I come to "Upload," I'm just going to grab something that's quickly available to me here, and now that logo will appear within my menu header as well.

The other nice thing about uploading your own logo is that you can choose one of the colors here that has been selected and apply it directly to your site. So even though we customized this and selected this blue shade, maybe I want to use this red that's coming directly from the logo. Now, everything is very much in line within my website.

Add Custom Domain

Lastly, within settings, I want you to make sure that you know where to go to set up your custom domain. Why? Without a custom domain, your website is going to be something like this: sites.google.com/view/whatever name you would like here, or at least whatever name is available.

This may be okay when you are first getting started, but if you want people to take your website seriously, you're going to want to apply a custom domain. And perhaps the easiest place to get your custom domain is at .online domains. Here, you can easily search for the domain that you like.

So for example, maybe I'm looking for "Scott Shop." I'm going to hit search and let's see what comes up. Yes, ScottShop.online is available. Why should you use a .online domain? Well, it's probably going to be very difficult to find a .com address that is still available, and .online is your next best option. Not only is it professional, it's memorable and fits with any business.

Go to www.get.online and use the coupon code SimpliVity to get your custom domain for the first year for just 99 cents. Click the link in the description below to learn more.

Edit Website Content

So now that we've customized our theme, added our pages, and perhaps added a custom domain, we want to come to the insert tab. This is probably where you'll be spending most of your time because it's where we can add text, images, embed files, embed code, and add our own content blocks as well.

Remember, anything on any of your Google site pages is editable. For example, if I don't like this tagline, all I need to do is click on it and edit. Let's say I want to change it to "Look and Feel Great." Maybe that's my new tagline here. I can change absolutely anything that I want.

If I want the text to be smaller, I can highlight it and reduce it down to, say, size 14. Hmm, maybe that's too small, so how about size 24? That looks better!

Anything you see on the screen can also be clicked and dragged. For example, if I want to move an item to the left-hand side or the right-hand side, I can simply click and drag it. When I click something, a grid format automatically appears, allowing me to easily align and organize my content the way I like.

Upload Images

Down below, we can take advantage of Photos. For example, I can click on an image. I'll click on it a second time to ensure I'm selecting just the image, not the image plus the title. Then, I come up here and select More, and choose Replace Image.

Now, I'll select Choose, which will automatically open up my Google Drive. Let's say I want to upload my SimpliVity image, so I select that and click Insert. Now, my own image or photo is inserted into the page.

One thing I don't like about this template is the all-caps text at the bottom. I could edit it, but instead, I'll select it and click the Remove button to delete it completely.

Insert Content Blocks

Because what I want to make use of is on the right-hand side, one of these content blocks. A content block is a combination of images and text, and it'll give you a quick preview here of what each of them will look like. This first one here I think makes the most sense with what I'd like to add. So all I need to do is click and drag it.

Now you can see I have not let go of my cursor, and you can see that there's a blue image here. Wherever I drop it, that's where it will be located. I do want it to be down here below this set of three images. So now I've got this content block waiting for me.

With this content block applied, I can now immediately start to add a new image, just like you saw me do before. I can come in here and start to add it or edit that text, and everything will remain or continue with the theme, the font, everything else that we've set up before, earlier.

So I can start to edit this text. Maybe I'm going to say new specials. I'm going to add some new deals here, and you can see that this text is identical to what we have up above. Everything else falls into place.

Of course, I can add other information here as well. Here you can see you've got some of the standard formatting options, including bold and italics. You can choose if you want to center a line or left-align it and include things such as bullet points. So you can really edit these sections to your heart's content.

Add Buttons

Now, down below the content blocks, we have a number of other options available to us as well. This includes the ability to add an image carousel, to add a divider, to add some other Google integrations, such as integrating directly a slideshow or a form or a calendar, or of course adding a button. That may be one of the most standard things that you include within your webpages.

I'm going to first select the button, and I need to give it a name. So maybe I'm going to say something like "book." Now I want them to directly go to the contact page when they select this button so they can book an appointment.

Now, down below we have an option here to either select one of the other pages that we have. In this case, I do want to select that contact page, or we can paste any other link.

For example, do you want to send them to your Calendly appointment scheduler? Well, you could paste that link in here. Do you want to send them to a social media site? You can paste in your social media link here as well. But by clicking into this empty text box here, it will show the other pages on our website. I'm going to select contact, and then I'm going to say insert.

Now you can see this "book now" button has been inserted. I don't need to keep it here. I can click and drag it. I can center it here on the screen, but maybe I want to include it here within this new specials area. So I can click and drag it and bring it here as well.

Now, when people read maybe the description of my new specials or the image here on the left-hand side, they can click this "book now" button and go directly to my contact screen.

Preview Website Changes

Now, of course, as you continue to build out your website and make changes, you're going to want to make sure that everything is behaving the way that you like. Google Sites has given us a handy preview button here near the top of the screen. By selecting this option here, we are going to be brought into a live version of our website.

I can click on any of my menu items here at the top of the screen, or I can come down and test that button that we just created. If I select "book now," perfect, it's going directly to that contact us screen.

You can also see how your website will look on other devices. By default, it's going to show you in a large screen what we see here, but so many users are using their phones or mobile devices. So here I can click on the phone version, and it's going to show me how things will be lined up.

We can also view our website in a tablet mode as well. You may want to come in here from time to time to see if the changes that you are making are being displayed the way you want them to when people are viewing your website on different devices.

Once you're done with your preview, simply come down here and select "X" to exit the preview, and you will be returned to your editing window.

Share & Publish Website

Lastly, let's make sure that you're ready to share your website with the world. None of the changes that we've made will be live until we come up here and select that publish button.

Now, to help us out, after selecting the publish button, it's going to show us the differences between the two. For example, on the right-hand side, this is what's currently published; this is what people will currently see. But on the left-hand side, you can see that we have the changes that we've applied. This is just one last way that it can help us decide if we want to proceed with publishing and making this change.

So I'm going to go ahead and hit publish, and now all of those changes have been made live. But now that your website is published, what link do you share with others?

Well, if we come here and select this dropdown arrow beside the publish button and select publish settings, you will find the web address for your website. So all you need to do is go ahead and copy this link and share it with others. But remember, in order to look and sound professional, you'll want to use a custom domain. Here's where you can go to manage your settings.

Now, if you have any other questions about how to get started with Google Sites, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Would you like to access any Google Drive file or folder directly from your Trello cards, and better yet, be able to edit them without ever having to leave your Trello account? Well, in this video I'm going to show you how to use Trello with Google Drive. 

Adding the Drive Power Up

And to get started, we need to access the Google Drive Power Up right here from within Trello.

So I'm going to click on that power-up icon.

I'm going to select Add Power-ups.

And the easiest thing to do is come up here to the search bar and just type in Drive.

It's going to be one of the top five results.

Here it is, Google Drive.

We are going to select Add.

And now if I close this dialogue and come back to my Trello board here, you can see I've got that Google Drive power-up here in the top right-hand corner.

Now clicking it is actually not going to do a whole lot.

Yes, I could start a new slides presentation, but the real value is here when we open up a card.

So let me go ahead and open up this Trello card.

And in the past, I would attach maybe a link to a Drive file, or I might upload something from my computer.

But with the Google Drive Power Up installed here under Power-ups, we have this Google Drive button.

Create and Attach a New Drive File

Now by selecting this Google Drive button, we are given three options. We can create and attach Google Drive files. That's right, a doc, a sheet, and many other things we can create right here from within Trello, or we can attach an existing file or folder from our Drive account.

So let's walk through each one by one.

Let's start with Create and Attach. Here you can see we can either create a document, a drawing, a slide, a sheet, or a new folder, all here from within our Trello account.

I'm going to go ahead and select Create Google Document. What it's going to do is create this document and the link and also give it the name of the card that I'm on.

So here under attachments, you can see I've got something called Jane Ferguson. That's because this Trello card is called Jane Ferguson. I don't need to keep it that way. I can rename it. If I come over here to the right and select these three dots, I can say Edit. Maybe I'm going to call this Jane Ferguson Meeting Notes. This is where I'm going to keep my notes of the phone calls I have or the communication that I have with Jane.

But now if I click on this link, it's going to take me directly to this Google document where I can start to add my notes, edit existing notes, or whatever I want to do with this file. It is saved, stored, and secured within my Google Drive account, but I can access that information here.

Let me just put something here, like maybe this meeting notes template, just so we've got some boilerplate information here that I can show you in just a moment.

Because one of the best things of using this Google Drive Power Up is that not only can I access it immediately, if I click that link and see other relevant information, like when it was last updated, I can say Open Preview.

Now you may think, "Oh, this is just a preview of what's inside that particular document." No, I can edit my notes. So we had a call on Monday, and it went very well. This is actually an editable document, so even if I close it here, if I go to the original document file within Google Drive, you can see that everything I changed, everything I added is live.

I never had to actually leave my Trello account. Let me show you one more time. If I just hover over it, I'll be given this little popup window. I'm going to say Open Preview, which was I think meant to be a preview, but this is all editable.

Let's do one more.

Attaching an Existing Drive File

I'm going to come over here to Google Drive, and this time we're just going to attach a file. I'm not going to start with a new file. I’m going to select Attach a File, and maybe I'm going to come over here, click on my sample files, and I've got a simple sheet.

So once again, it's going to add it as a link. It's called Inventory C. I may be happy with that, but you can come over here and select Edit. I'm going to say these are Inventory Sales Numbers. Maybe that's what this is, so I'm going to give that a more relevant title.

It's not going to change the title of the file within Google Drive; this is just for your reference here within Trello. But once again, if I hover over and say Open Preview, this time it is a spreadsheet. I'm going to come over here and say, you know what? That is not the price anymore; it is now $1.95.

And we also sold a lot more pencils. We sold 203 pencils this week. So I've updated this spreadsheet, I’ve got the relevant numbers, and I'm still here within Trello.

Attaching a Drive Folder

Now the last thing we want to look at here is the third option: Attach a Folder. You might think that the name of the folder is just going to appear like we see here with the links, but it actually gets much better than that.

So I'm going to select this option, and I've got a folder here called Color Folders that I want to include with this Trello card. I’m going to select it. Here, you can see it has brought over the folder name, Color Folders, along with the five folders within it.

Now, I am just one click away from any of these folders. For example, if I want to access my Sales folder, I can click on it, and immediately I'm brought to the details of that sales folder. Maybe I want to jump into my Marketing folder. Perfect! I don’t happen to have anything in this sample Marketing folder, but I'm one click away from accessing the contents of this folder.

Removing Files or Folders

Now, if you want to remove any of these items here, you can see in the top right-hand corner that if I want to remove this attached folder, I can select that option. Now we are back to just the files that we attached earlier. The same thing applies here; if we come over to the three dots, we can select Delete if we want to remove any of these items as well.

As always, I would love to hear from you! Do you have any further questions about how to use Google Drive with Trello? If so, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching today's video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it’s very simple.

Say goodbye to writing the same email over and over again.

In this video, I'm going to show you how to use Gmail templates so you can reply to emails in just seconds.

Now to get started, first things first, you want to make sure that you have templates turned on.

We want to come all the way up here to the top and select the gear icon, then select See all Settings.

And over to the right, there is an advanced tab.

We want to click on that.

And here you can see that templates is one of the options.

Now, by default, templates are disabled, so you may have to change this from disabled to enabled.

And whenever you're making changes on this screen, you want to make sure to come down here and select save changes.

Now, let's go back to our inbox and compose a message.

If we come down here to our More Options, this is going to be at the very bottom of your Gmail dialogue.

If we select more options, we now have templates available to us.

Now, I've already created some templates, but let's get you started with creating your own.

Now, you'll notice there's nothing here that says Start or Create.

That's because you can create a template from any email.

So all you need to do is type in what you want to use as a template in the future.

So for example, I like to send a follow-up email when I meet with a potential client.

So here I've got a nicely formatted message, I've got some bullet points here, I've got some bolding.

I've even included a link to additional resources if I wanted to.

I can include images.

You can add absolutely anything that you would to a regular email and then create a template out of it.

So now that I'm happy with what my template looks like, I need to come down here, select More Options, hover over templates, and I'm going to come down here and say Save Draft as template.

Now we actually have two options here.

I could overwrite an existing template if I wanted to, but in this case, I want to save it as a new template.

But regardless of whether you're overwriting an old template or a new template, I'm going to give you a super helpful tip, and that has to do with your email signature.

If I was to create a new template right now, it would include everything here, including my email signature.

But I actually don't want to do that because my email signature is already appearing by default, meaning that when I go to use this template in the future, I would actually see two email signatures down below.

So if you automatically have email signatures turned on, my recommendation is that you delete it before you save a new template or overwrite an existing one.

So I'm going to come down here, once again, Save Draft as template.

I'm going to say save as a new template.

And then all I need to do here is give it a name.

Now, when it comes to naming your template, keep this in mind: whatever you name the template, if the subject line is blank, it will put that into the subject line.

So if you're creating a brand new email, this may be helpful if you want to use this as the subject line.

But if you're replying to an email message, anything that you name it here will not replace what is already there in the original email.

So I'm just going to call this one.

Let's just call this a post meeting message, something like that, something descriptive so I know what it is.

I'm going to hit save.

Nothing changes here within my email, but now if I come down below, if I go to templates, there is my post meeting message.

Now going forward, I can save so much time.

Here I am within a brand new message.

I'm going to come down to templates, and I'm going to say post meeting message, and perfect, everything has been input into that message.

Now, if you want to turn your emails into actual sales and new clients, I recommend checking out Pipedrive AI.

Pipedrive AI gives your CRM almost magical abilities, including the option to analyze your entire sales pipeline and identify what is most valuable and what you should be working on next.

It also includes great AI features, such as writing your own emails and replying to customers and summarizing their information so you can determine who should you be reaching out to next.

To get started with Pipedrive AI for free, and to receive a special bonus just for Simpletivity users, click the link in the description down below.

Do you need an easier way to manage your shopping list? Would you like to share your list with someone else and even get a reminder when you're near your local grocery store? Well, in this video I'm going to show you how to use Google Keep to create the ultimate shopping list.

So to get started, you can go to keep.google.com, and whether you are an Android or an iPhone user, you can download the Keep app directly to your mobile device. I'm going to be showing you how to set this up here within the desktop just because it's easier to show off. But all of these features and all of these settings are available within the mobile app.

So to get started, we want to come up here and take a new note, but not just a regular note. We want to come up here and select this new list, this checklist icon. Now at this stage you may think that we should just start typing in the items we need to buy. I can type in apples, I can start to type in oranges. But wait, before we continue with our list here, let's come back up to the title and I want you to give the name of your list, either shopping list or grocery list, maybe food list, and I'll show you why. 

Now, when I come back to my list down below, I'm going to start to type in the word bananas and look at all of these suggestions. Yes, in my case I want bananas, but maybe it is banana bread.

Some days maybe it's bandaid. Some days I'm going to select bananas. I'm going to come back to the next line. I'm going to type in mi and yes, do I want to buy milk? Milk powder? Maybe I'm going to need of a mirror.

It's going to give me a number of helpful suggestions based on the title of my list up here. So don't forget to give it a name such as shopping list.

Now I've gone ahead and added a few more things to my list just so we have a few more things to work with, but as you can see, as this list grows, it's going to be a lot more difficult to see what is on our list and also how can we categorize these into different sections.

Well, the great thing here within Google Keep is that we can not only drag things up and down, we can drag things in a different order, but what is much more helpful is that we can indent our list.

So I'm going to come up here to the very top. I'm going to place my cursor in front of the A in apples and hit enter. That's going to allow me to create a new item above that particular item.

And I'm going to add an item here called produce. And down below you can see that the next three items are all going to be within the produce section.

Next I'm going to come to apples and I'm going to drag it over to the right. I'm going to do the same for oranges and the same for bananas. Now I've got this great category here where I can see all of the things that I'm wanting to buy in that particular section.

I'm going to go ahead and repeat that process here down below. So maybe this is something I want to label as dairy, and again, we're going to move cheese and then we're going to move milk over to the right.

Now, you may think that that's a lot of movement, but once you've created these headers, once you've created these first level list items, we can continue to add things down below and they will stay within that indented order.

So under bananas, I'm going to hit enter and maybe I'm going to enter in carrots. Maybe I also need to pick up some lettuce, so I'm going to enter that in here as well.

The advantage is not only is it easier to see the different sections or the different categories, but what if I go shopping and I purchase all five of these items, but I don't want to have my phone out the entire time.

Maybe I'm going to review, once I've gone through the produce section, I can say, yes, I've gotten everything here. I'm going to select one check mark and that's going to cross off everything that is indented underneath that top level list. I can still come in here and uncheck a few things. 

Maybe I forgot oranges, and if you like, you can always go one at a time, but this makes it a lot more convenient. Let's go ahead and add one more here down below. This is going to be our bakery section here, and now we've got our bagels and our donuts in the appropriate category as well.

But I'm actually going to do one more thing with our sample list. I really want these headers or these top level lists to stand out because you know how it is in a busy grocery store. There's a lot of things going on. You've got your phone out, you want to quickly and easily see these different areas. So what I like to do is add an emoji to the front of these categories. I'm going to bring up my emoji menu here, and maybe I'm going to select this red apple for produce down below dairy.

Once again, I'm going to bring up my emoji area and maybe this glass of milk that seems appropriate. And lastly, in the bakery area here, I'm going to select this loaf of bread. So not only am I adding a little bit of color to my list, this makes it so much easier for me to see these different areas.

But before we move on, let's make sure that we have our list in the correct order. And what I mean by that is that your local grocery store probably has a very specific layout or perhaps you go around the store in the same order each time. So for example, the bakery is the very first place that I visit after getting my cart.

So what I'm going to do is we're going to come back here and drag the bakery area, but because this is the top level, everything down below is going to move with it. So I'm going to grab it, I'm going to bring it all the way up to the top, and don't worry, my bagels and my donuts have come with me. Maybe the dairy section is next. Well, that's no problem either. I'm going to bring that up to the top and now I can have it in the order that I like the order that makes sense as I travel around my grocery store.

One thing to mention when it comes to checking off the parts of your list here, you can see I have things set up that I can cross things off either one at a time or the entire section if need be, and they remain visible, but you don't have to have it that way. I

'm going to go ahead and close this note and come up here to my settings. The good news is within Google Keep, there is not a lot of settings. And here you can see that the second option here says move checked items to bottom. And I currently have it unchecked. That means when I'm checking things off, those items are going to remain and just shown cross through. 

But if I check this box and hit save, let's go back to our shopping list. This time, if I check off cheese, it is now gone from the dairy section. And if we go all the way to the bottom, you can see it's shown as a completed item. If I go ahead and select milk, the same thing happens. It shows down below.

Now we don't have to see the crossed off items here. We can always minimize that. It still shows that there's two completed items, but this is really up to personal preference. Do you want to see those items here?

Think about when you are shopping or do you want them to be hidden down below? Personally, I can find it a little jarring that my entire list is shrinking or moving as I'm going around the store. So I'm going to go back to my settings here and I'm going to uncheck that box so that when I'm going through, and yes, I've got all of my dairy, and yes, I've gone through all the bakery, I can still easily see that they are all checked off.

That's the other nice thing here is that the top level cannot be checked unless everything else is checked below it. But there's one last thing we want to make note of here. When you get to the end of your shopping day and you've crossed everything off, often you may want to reuse or repurpose this list. We often are creatures of habit and purchase many of the same things on our next shopping trip.

Well, what we can do here is either go to the top level and uncheck each section, but here's a much easier way to do so. If we come down here and select more here, we can select uncheck all items. And no matter how long your list is, everything on your list will be unchecked, and now it's ready for you the next time around.

Now the next great feature here within Google Keep is the ability to share your list with someone else. And if we come down to the very bottom here with this collaborator icon, we can select this and start to enter in the email address of anyone we like. Maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's a roommate, someone else that you go shopping with, or maybe one of you does most of the shopping, but of course you are both contributing to it.

All you need to do is enter in the email address of the person you'd like to share this list with and then select save. And now at the very bottom of our shopping list, we can see either the initial or the icon of that individual. Even if I go ahead and close this particular note, I can still see that icon down below. I can see exactly whom I'm sharing this list with.

This is especially helpful if the other person has already left for the grocery store or maybe are even in the grocery store at the moment. The other person can actually still add a few last minute items in real time, and you can be sure that the shopper will see them and be able to pick them up on time.

If at any time you want to remove someone, you can select that collaborator button again and then come over here and select X to remove them from that particular note. 

Another feature to take advantage of is to make your notes stand out that much more. Sometimes our notes can get lost with all of the other notes that are happening here within Google Key. Well, at the bottom of the note, we have the option to add a background. There are two options available to us. In fact, we can either add a solid color or we can add a graphic as a background. And in fact, they even have one called groceries.

If I select this, it's going to add this groceries background. I'm going to go ahead and hit close, and you can see it certainly stands out, but maybe it's a little too confusing. Maybe it's going to be a little more difficult for me to see or read what is going on.

So I'm going to come back to this background. I'm going to remove it, go back to the default, and maybe I'm just going to select a color like this yellowish sand color that's going to still make it stand out, but it's also still easy to read right here amongst my other key notes.

The other step, which can be very, very helpful, is to pin your shopping list. What that means is that it will pin this note to the top of your list. Again, whether you're using desktop or whether you are on your phone, we are often adding and editing our shopping list on a regular basis.

And when you get to the store, you don't want to have to search or fumble to find out where it is. So by pinning your list, that can be very helpful as well.

But maybe the best tip of all is the one I've saved for last, and that is by setting a reminder. Now, you may think that that's pretty straightforward. If we select that little bell icon, we can choose to pick a particular date and time. Maybe I want to remind myself to go shopping this Friday and I can pick a particular time when I will be reminded.

But better yet, there's a special type of reminder which will remind us when we are near a particular location. And since we are creating a shopping list, the place we are going to select is of course, our local grocery store.

I'm going to select pick place. In this case, I'm going to start typing in the word Safeway. And in my case, I'm going to say that I'm living in Seattle. This happens to be the one that is closest to me.

Of course, you can enter in an actual address or just start to type in the name of your grocery store and your location. I'm going to select this one and hit save.

After adding the location reminder, you will see it here in the bottom left hand corner, and if you hover over it, it will actually show you the precise address as well. What this means is that the next time I am near this particular location, as long as I have reminders and notifications set on my mobile device, I will receive a reminder when I'm near this particular store, maybe I'm not even thinking about picking up some groceries, but if I'm in the area, how helpful can that be to get a location based reminder?

Of course, these are features you don't have to use, but I want to make sure that you are aware of them so you can take full advantage of this ultimate shopping list.

Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Adding filters and rules to your Gmail account is one of the easiest ways to keep things organized and to make sure that you can manage your email the way that you want. So in this video I'm going to show you everything you need to know about creating, editing and managing your Gmail filters.

Let's get started with an example.  Here within my inbox, I have a number of emails that are from my account and have this in the subject line event confirmed. In fact, three of my first four emails here are these event confirmed emails.

These are simply telling me that an event has been set up, but they're not very helpful and therefore I don't want to see them appear in my inbox. I want them to skip my inbox entirely and maybe I want to apply a particular label so I can go and review them later.

So in order to create our filter, we can either start by coming up here to the search mailbox and start to enter in our criteria, or we can click on one of these emails and at the top of the email, if we click on the more option, you'll see there's an option to filter messages like these.

I'm going to select this option, and once again, it's going to bring us up here to this search criteria, but it's going to give us some additional options.

Now the first thing that you may notice is that the only thing that it has brought in is the from address, and in this case it happens to be my email address. But if I come down here and select search, you will see that that's bringing in a lot more than just the emails that I want to filter. In fact, it's bringing in all of the emails that are from me.

That is not what I want. So what I'm going to do is come up here and select show search options. Once again, we still have my email address here, but I'm going to want to come down and be a lot more specific.

Now there's a number of different fields which we can add. We can include details such as who the email was sent to, what was included in the subject line, and even drill down into the body of the email as well, including things such as certain words within the message or maybe words that are absent. We can even go into greater detail such as the size of the message or if it includes an attachment.

But in our case, we want to focus on that subject line here in the background, you can see that all of them have this event confirmed as a part of the subject line.

So I'm going to come up here to the subject line. I've already typed this in previously, so I'm going to include event confirmed and we can go ahead and select that search button. Once again, you'll notice that we have a create filter option, - But I recommend that you start with a search.

Why? Because now I can be sure that the filter that I'm about to create is only going to apply to the emails that I wanted to. Here you can see those three emails have been returned, so now I can confidently go ahead and create that filter.

Once again, we're going to return to that search bar, come over here and select show search options. We still have all of those options available to us, and then we're going to select create Filter.

Now, in fact, it hasn't actually created the filter just yet because we have to answer some other important questions such as what exactly is going to happen when a message that matches this criteria enters into our inbox.

And we have about a dozen options available to us here. The first one here is to skip the inbox, which is really another way of saying archiving that message. And in my example, that's exactly what I want to do. I don't want it to start in my inbox, I want it to come over here to my all mail area here within Gmail.

But we're actually going to go one step further and add a label as well. I can always come back and select that search filter options, and we'll be returned to this screen here, some of the other ones for us to consider. 

Mark as Read, you will know the difference between something that is grayed out or something that you've opened up or that you've read versus something that is unread.

And maybe in my example, I want to make it unread as well. So I'm going to check that box. We can choose if we want to add a Gmail star to those messages. We can choose if we want to apply a label to those messages. And if I check this box and come to this dropdown, I will see a complete list of all of my current labels.

But if I want to add a new one, don't worry. I can do that here as well. In this case, I'm going to say a new label and I'm going to call this event Con Confirmations, something very simple like that. I'm going to select Create, and now I will have that new label.

You can see it actually appear here in the lower left under that label section. Now, if you'd like AI to help you create smart labels right here within Gmail, I recommend that you check out Same box with AI technology, same box prioritizes essential messages, saving you hours of time each week, and by learning from your behavior, same box will clean up your inbox, get rid of spam, and organize your emails into relevant folders.

Best of all, same box works with any email provider.

To get started, go to sanebox.com/sim or click the link in the description below. We also have the option to forward these emails to someone else, forward it to another address. You will see here in the dropdown, I have already set up a forwarding email address if I want to choose this option. If you want to forward it to another address, you will need to click on this add forwarding address button, which will take you into Gmail settings.

Just note that if you choose this option at this stage, you will have to start and create your filter all over again from scratch. It will not save it in this state, but this can be helpful if there is certain criteria and you want to forward it to someone else or perhaps another address that you manage Below that is the option to delete the message altogether.

Now, in my example, you can see that this is grayed out. I can't actually select it, that's because I selected Skip the inbox. You can't skip the inbox, meaning archive it and delete it at the same time. But if I did want to delete it, it would send that message directly to the trash. And remember, things in the trash will remain for a full 30 days before they are removed or deleted permanently.

Below that, we have the option to never send it to spam. Do you have a particular sender that always ends up in your spam folder even though you want to read it or be made known of that message?

Here, you can choose to never send those messages to spam. We can also choose to reply with a template, and if you've created Gmail templates in the past, you can reply with a template which you've created.

Just be very careful that the template that you have created or selected is appropriate for whatever criteria you have selected. We can also choose to always market as important or never market as important, and we can also categorize these particular emails. Now, these categories are the default or standard categories here within Gmail, including things such as primary social and promotions.

Now, the very last option here is very important. It states also apply the filter to three matching conversations. We know from doing our search that we have three existing conversations here that apply to this search criteria.

Now this is up to personal preference and maybe depending on the criteria that you've entered, if I leave this unchecked, these messages will remain in my inbox and everything that we've set up here will apply for new emails or new messages in the future.

But if I do select this option, it will apply this and therefore immediately archive it, mark it as read and apply these particular labels qs well.

So I'm going to go ahead and leave this as checked, and I'm going to select create filter. We are brought back to our search criteria, but let's go ahead and return to our inbox. And you'll notice that those emails are now removed. They no longer exist here in our inbox. And if I come over here down to labels and select event confirmations, you will see that there are our three emails and all of them have been marked as read just like we created within our filter.

But what if you've made a mistake and you want to go back and edit your filter or what if you just want to keep track of all of the filters which you've created in the past In order to do so, we're going to need to come up here to the right hand corner of our screen, select the gear icon, and then select See all settings.

And if we come over to about the fifth tab, you will see something called filters and blocked addresses. Here we will see a complete list of all of the filters which we've created and are currently applied to this account, including at the very bottom, the one that we just created. Here. We can see it includes the from address, the subject, and then it will also tell us what it is doing, skipping the inbox marking as red and applying this particular label.

So if I need to come back and edit this filter or any of the other filters here, I can come over here to the right hand side and select that edit link, and we will first be brought to the search criteria. So here I can change or add other email addresses.

Maybe I do want to include certain keywords or maybe I only want to include messages that have an attachment. I don't have to make changes on this screen. Maybe I'm happy with the settings that I've set up here. I'm going to select continue, and now we can come back and edit our filter criteria.

So maybe in this example, I don't want the messages to be marked as read. I'm going to uncheck that box, and then I'm going to say update the filter. I will be returned to the filter screen here within our settings. And you can see that this filter has been updated. And if there's a filter that you no longer need or is not behaving as you would like, you can also choose the delete option and remove any or all of your filters here on the right hand side.

Now, while we're here within our editing screen, let's take a look at some of the other helpful ways in which we can create filters.

Let's start by taking a look at this first filter up here, which you can see includes several different email addresses. I'm going to go ahead and select edit, just so it's easier to see.

You may want to apply the exact same filter, meaning you want a number of different messages, perhaps from a number of different senders to go to the same label or to have the exact same behavior, but you don't need to create a different filter for every single sender.

In this example, you can see that I've included three different email addresses, but the key thing is, is that I've added this operator or capital or meaning whenever I receive an email from this person or this person or this other person, all of my filter behavior, if I select continue here, everything that I've selected on this screen will apply to all of them.

Now, there's another search operator, which may be helpful for your filters and rules, and that's the and operator, capital A and D. Now, while this will not make sense in the from line, it could make sense within the two line, meaning maybe you want to apply a filter or apply a special label if someone sends a message to you and your boss or to you and someone else in particular.

In this case, this will only look for messages where a message has been sent to both of those individuals on the exact same email. Now, a third search operator, which can make your filters so much more powerful, but also easier to use is if you use the asterisk, which will be used as a wild card when you include it within your criteria.

How often have you received email messages from a particular domain, a particular sender? However, they have different people or they have different addresses in the front of their email address.

In this particular example, I've chosen to use an asterisk before the at symbol in this address, meaning that any email coming from this domain name will have this filter applied. 

I don't have to worry if it's from support or hello or marketing or from John. All of it will be caught as a part of this filter. So this can be extremely helpful if you don't want to include multiple email addresses or if you want to just zero in on a particular domain.

Now, if you're wanting to learn even more ways on how to keep your Gmail account organized and simple to manage, I encourage that you watch this playlist next and to be notified of new SimpliVity videos. Make sure to subscribe. Thank you so much for watching today's video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

- Adding filters and rules to your Gmail account is one of the easiest ways to keep things organized and to make sure that you can manage your email the way that you want.

So in this video I'm going to show you everything you need to know about creating, editing and managing your Gmail filters. Let's get started with an example here Within my inbox, I have a number of emails that are from my account and have this in the subject line event confirmed. In fact, three of my first four emails here are these event confirmed emails.

These are simply telling me that an event has been set up, but they're not very helpful and therefore I don't want to see them appear in my inbox. I want them to skip my inbox entirely and maybe I want to apply a particular label so I can go and review them later.

So in order to create our filter, we can either start by coming up here to the search mailbox and start to enter in our criteria, or we can click on one of these emails and at the top of the email, if we click on the more option, you'll see there's an option to filter messages like these. I'm going to select this option, and once again, it's going to bring us up here to this search criteria, but it's going to give us some additional options.

Now the first thing that you may notice is that the only thing that it has brought in is the from address, and in this case it happens to be my email address. But if I come down here and select search, you will see that that's bringing in a lot more than just the emails that I want to filter. In fact, it's bringing in all of the emails that are from me. That is not what I want.

So what I'm going to do is come up here and select show search options. Once again, we still have my email address here, but I'm going to want to come down and be a lot more specific. Now there's a number of different fields which we can add. We can include details such as who the email was sent to, what was included in the subject line, and even drill down into the body of the email as well, including things such as certain words within the message or maybe words that are absent.

We can even go into greater detail such as the size of the message or if it includes an attachment. But in our case, we want to focus on that subject line here in the background, you can see that all of them have this event confirmed as a part of the subject line.

So I'm going to come up here to the subject line. I've already typed this in previously, so I'm going to include event confirmed and we can go ahead and select that search button.

Once again, you'll notice that we have a create filter option, but I recommend that you start with a search. Why? Because now I can be sure that the filter that I'm about to create is only going to apply to the emails that I wanted to. Here you can see those three emails have been returned, so now I can confidently go ahead and create that filter.

Once again, we're going to return to that search bar, come over here and select show search options. We still have all of those options available to us, and then we're going to select create Filter. Now, in fact, it hasn't actually created the filter just yet because we have to answer some other important questions such as what exactly is going to happen when a message that matches this criteria enters into our inbox. And we have about a dozen options available to us here.

The first one here is to skip the inbox, which is really another way of saying archiving that message. And in my example, that's exactly what I want to do. I don't want it to start in my inbox, I want it to come over here to my all mail area here within Gmail. But we're actually going to go one step further and add a label as well.

I can always come back and select that search filter options, and we'll be returned to this screen here, some of the other ones for us to consider. Mark as Read, you will know the difference between something that is grayed out or something that you've opened up or that you've read versus something that is unread. And maybe in my example, I want to make it unread as well. So I'm going to check that box.

We can choose if we want to add a Gmail star to those messages. We can choose if we want to apply a label to those messages. And if I check this box and come to this dropdown, I will see a complete list of all of my current labels. But if I want to add a new one, don't worry. I can do that here as well. In this case, I'm going to say a new label and I'm going to call this event Con Confirmations, something very simple like that.

I'm going to select Create, and now I will have that new label. You can see it actually appear here in the lower left under that label section. Now, if you'd like AI to help you create smart labels right here within Gmail, I recommend that you check out Same box with AI technology, same box prioritizes essential messages, saving you hours of time each week, and by learning from your behavior, same box will clean up your inbox, get rid of spam, and organize your emails into relevant folders. Best of all, same box works with any email provider. To get started, go to sanebox.com/sim or click the link in the description below.

We also have the option to forward these emails to someone else, forward it to another address. You will see here in the dropdown, I have already set up a forwarding email address if I want to choose this option. If you want to forward it to another address, you will need to click on this add forwarding address button, which will take you into Gmail settings.

Just note that if you choose this option at this stage, you will have to start and create your filter all over again from scratch. It will not save it in this state, but this can be helpful if there is certain criteria and you want to forward it to someone else or perhaps another address that you manage.

Below that is the option to delete the message altogether. Now, in my example, you can see that this is grayed out. I can't actually select it, that's because I selected Skip the inbox. You can't skip the inbox, meaning archive it and delete it at the same time. But if I did want to delete it, it would send that message directly to the trash. And remember, things in the trash will remain for a full 30 days before they are removed or deleted permanently.

Below that, we have the option to never send it to spam. Do you have a particular sender that always ends up in your spam folder even though you want to read it or be made known of that message? Here, you can choose to never send those messages to spam. We can also choose to reply with a template, and if you've created Gmail templates in the past, you can reply with a template which you've created. Just be very careful that the template that you have created or selected is appropriate for whatever criteria you have selected.

We can also choose to always market as important or never market as important, and we can also categorize these particular emails. Now, these categories are the default or standard categories here within Gmail, including things such as primary social and promotions.

Now, the very last option here is very important. It states also apply the filter to three matching conversations. We know from doing our search that we have three existing conversations here that apply to this search criteria. 

Now this is up to personal preference and maybe depending on the criteria that you've entered, if I leave this unchecked, these messages will remain in my inbox and everything that we've set up here will apply for new emails or new messages in the future. But if I do select this option, it will apply this and therefore immediately archive it, mark it as read and apply these particular labels as well.

So I'm going to go ahead and leave this as checked, and I'm going to select create filter. We are brought back to our search criteria, but let's go ahead and return to our inbox. And you'll notice that those emails are now removed. They no longer exist here in our inbox. And if I come over here down to labels and select event confirmations, you will see that there are our three emails and all of them have been marked as read just like we created within our filter.

But what if you've made a mistake and you want to go back and edit your filter or what if you just want to keep track of all of the filters which you've created in the past In order to do so, we're going to need to come up here to the right hand corner of our screen, select the gear icon, and then select See all settings.

And if we come over to about the fifth tab, you will see something called filters and blocked addresses. Here we will see a complete list of all of the filters which we've created and are currently applied to this account, including at the very bottom, the one that we just created. Here. We can see it includes the from address, the subject, and then it will also tell us what it is doing, skipping the inbox marking as red and applying this particular label.

So if I need to come back and edit this filter or any of the other filters here, I can come over here to the right hand side and select that edit link, and we will first be brought to the search criteria. So here I can change or add other email addresses. Maybe I do want to include certain keywords or maybe I only want to include messages that have an attachment. I don't have to make changes on this screen. Maybe I'm happy with the settings that I've set up here. I'm going to select continue, and now we can come back and edit our filter criteria.

So maybe in this example, I don't want the messages to be marked as read. I'm going to uncheck that box, and then I'm going to say update the filter. I will be returned to the filter screen here within our settings. And you can see that this filter has been updated. And if there's a filter that you no longer need or is not behaving as you would like, you can also choose the delete option and remove any or all of your filters here on the right hand side.

Now, while we're here within our editing screen, let's take a look at some of the other helpful ways in which we can create filters. 

Let's start by taking a look at this first filter up here, which you can see includes several different email addresses. I'm going to go ahead and select edit, just so it's easier to see. You may want to apply the exact same filter, meaning you want a number of different messages, perhaps from a number of different senders to go to the same label or to have the exact same behavior, but you don't need to create a different filter for every single sender.

In this example, you can see that I've included three different email addresses, but the key thing is, is that I've added this operator or capital or meaning whenever I receive an email from this person or this person or this other person, all of my filter behavior, if I select continue here, everything that I've selected on this screen will apply to all of them.

Now, there's another search operator, which may be helpful for your filters and rules, and that's the and operator, capital A and D. Now, while this will not make sense in the from line, it could make sense within the two line, meaning maybe you want to apply a filter or apply a special label if someone sends a message to you and your boss or to you and someone else in particular. In this case, this will only look for messages where a message has been sent to both of those individuals on the exact same email.

Now, a third search operator, which can make your filters so much more powerful, but also easier to use is if you use the asterisk, which will be used as a wild card when you include it within your criteria. How often have you received email messages from a particular domain, a particular sender? However, they have different people or they have different addresses in the front of their email address.

In this particular example, I've chosen to use an asterisk before the at symbol in this address, meaning that any email coming from this domain name will have this filter applied. I don't have to worry if it's from support or hello or marketing or from John. All of it will be caught as a part of this filter.

So this can be extremely helpful if you don't want to include multiple email addresses or if you want to just zero in on a particular domain. Now, if you're wanting to learn even more ways on how to keep your Gmail account organized and simple to manage, I encourage that you watch this playlist next. And to be notified of new Simpletivity videos. make sure to subscribe. Thank you so much for watching today's video.

And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

I need a screenshot and markup tool that is fast, easy to use, and allows me to share them with others without having to get attachments involved.

And the good news is, is that I found something, it's called Markup Hero, which is a free Chrome extension, which does everything I need it to do. And then so much more. So let me show you how it works.

First off, one of my favorite features is the ability to take a full page screenshot. Here I am within a website and there's no way I can take a single screenshot and get everything in.

But with Markup Hero, I can come up here and take what's called a scrolling screenshot. What it's going to do is take a screenshot of the entire webpage and then stitch it back together. So I've got the entire page at my disposal.

Here I am within my Markup Hero interface, and you can see I've got the entire webpage here. Now I can continue to markup, add annotations, and edit it any way that I like.

Now, markup Hero has all of the standard features that you would expect with a markup tool. We can add text, we can add arrows, lines, and highlight different things as well.

But perhaps one of my favorite features is the call out arrow, which actually combines both the arrow and the text at the same time. So let's say I'm giving feedback on this website and I need to say something like This is way to small.

Not only is this feature quick and easy to use, but best of all, once I've added my text, I can continue to edit this. Actually, I made a mistake. I wasn't referring to this, I was actually referring to the title up here.

All I need to do is click the arrow and move it to where I want to. And if I don't think the text is going to be as visible, I can move that here as well. Maybe the blue isn't going to stand out the way I want. I can change it to green. It's even going to adjust my text to make it that much more readable for the person that I'm sending this to as well.

Another one of my favorite features is the ability to blur sensitive information. How often have you shared a screenshot, maybe from your email or from a document, and you want to make sure that you are not sharing other people's contact information or private financial information?

Here I can simply drag over the area that I want to blur. I'm going to say apply that blur. And yes, here within Markup Hero, it's actually going to permanently blur that markup.

Why is that important? Far too often, other markup tools will only apply a temporary blur, meaning that we can come back and delete this or others could remove it as well. But in this case, we can safely send or share this document knowing that they will not see the information down below.

And speaking of share markup, hero keeps it very, very simple. So we don't have to get our email attachments involved here on the top right hand corner. We can click the share button and choose if we want to make this markup Collaborative meaning do we want to allow them to add their own markups and make edits, or do we only want to allow them to view this markup itself?

We can choose whichever one is suitable for our needs. I'm going to click that share button again. And now that link is copied to the clipboard. That's right. I can now share this link within a project management tool within an instant messaging tool. I don't even have to get email or attachments involved, but let's go back to some of the other features that make Markup Hero so valuable.

You'll notice if I click on the icon here within my browser, we actually have a lot of features available to us as well. Of course, we can select a particular area. So if I just want to focus on perhaps this image, I'm just going to come over and select it and immediately it will bring it into my editor where I can go ahead and make further changes. 

Another feature that I appreciate is the ability to simply take a screenshot of the tab. That's right. You don't want to have the other components of your browser or your desktop involved in the screenshot.

If I select screenshot tab, it will only take a screenshot of what's on screen, and again, I can continue with my editing needs.

Now, when taking screenshots and making markups of your images, sometimes it can be hard to keep track. So many screenshot tools are simply a one and done meaning it will take the screenshot and allow you to make an edit, but it can be hard to retrieve and find that information later.

Well, here within Markup Hero, it makes it very easy for us to either add our own collections or keep everything in one centralized place so I can quickly and easily go back to a previous screenshot, make an edit, or even combine different pages together.

So for example, maybe within this screenshot, I'm wanting to replace this image with something else that I already have on my computer, but I don't want to send an email with multiple attachments. I want them to understand that I'm talking about the exact same image or perhaps the exact same project here at the bottom.

I can add multiple pages to any of my screenshots. I'm going to go over here to my file folder, and I'm simply going to drag and drop in this image, which is related to this screenshot. Now it is added as a second page where I can of course continue to make changes or apply edits and annotations here, but it's not going to arrive as a separate document. I can share it as a link and add as many pages as I want together.

Now, if you want to try Markup Hero for yourself, you can do it absolutely for free, either without - Creating an account at all or by creating your own free account. And if you want to use all of the features of Markup Hero, I've got a special deal for you.

If you use the Code SimpliVity 50, you can get 50% off any monthly or annual plan. Just go to markup hero.com and get started today.

Thank you so much for watching today's video. And remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

This video is brought to you by Pipedrive ai. More about them later in the video.

There are a number of add-ons and extensions and more expensive tools like Calendly, which will allow you to embed possible meeting times within your email. But did you know that you can do this absolutely for free within your Gmail account?

Here I am composing a new message. I'm wanting to meet with someone this week, but I don't want to waste my time going back and forth discovering our availability. I want to share the times that I would like to meet with this person and allow them to book that time in just a single click.

So after I've written maybe a brief introduction here, all I need to do is come down to the very bottom, select the more options, and at the very bottom we have the option here to set up a time to meet.

Now there's two options available here to us. Offer times that you're free or we can create an event. Now, this second option here is really no different than just creating an event within Google Calendar and then inviting them directly. So let's focus on this first one here. 

By selecting this, what it's going to do is open up the Google side panel here on the right hand side and open up our calendar. You'll notice within the email it's got a bit of a placeholder and it's giving us some instructions. Select times in the calendar sidebar for a one one-to-one event.

So here on the right hand side, I've got a preview of my calendar, and all I need to do is click and drag any available times that I would like to offer. I'm going to move over to Wednesday here, and I'm going to say, well, I'm available between 10 and 12. I'm going to click and drag and then release. And here you can see it's added this placeholder.

I'm going to come down here in the afternoon. I'm going to do the same thing. Click and drag and then release. And here you can see down below it is showing the availability in which I have added.

Now if you want to change or if you've made a mistake, you can always remove one here. You can see is the X beside. I can remove that slot if I need to and if I want to change the duration, I can also click and drag. You'll notice these little white dots at the top and bottom.

So if I want to shorten this up, for example, I can do so there. If I want to maybe extend it all the way to nine 30, I can do so here as well. But let me go ahead and add a few more times. I'm going to go back and add that afternoon. I'm going to maybe go out to Friday and say that I'm also available early Friday morning, going to say seven to nine.

Now this does not mean that I'm requesting a two hour meeting. I'm simply offering my availability slots. - You'll see down below. By default, it's going to select a one hour meeting, but we can come in here and change that anywhere from 15 minutes to a custom duration. I'm going to say 30 minutes in this particular example. And you can even see in the little graphic up above, it's split it into 30 minute increments.

Now, down below, we can also edit and add things as well. You can see here if I wanted to change any of these times or add additional times on a particular day or simply remove it, I can do that down here as well. I just find it so much easier to click and drag.

Let's say I want to just move this entire block up from 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM I'm going to move it back here. I just find it so much easier to do.

So up here, this is much better for seeing sort of a summary of the available times that I'm going to offer when I'm happy adding my availability. I'm going to select this next button here, and now we can give this meeting a title. So maybe I'm going to call this one chat with Ted, maybe that's who I'm meeting with. 

So I can give it any event title that I want. I can once again change the event duration. It's giving me sort of a second chance to change that event duration and then also review my availability as well.

Now, this isn't mandatory, but down below there is a more info area here I can add a specific location or conferencing information. If I select this dropdown, I can automatically add a Google Meet video conferencing link. I can say, actually, let's meet at this location and add an address. I could also say that this is going to be a phone call and that will require them to provide their phone number, or I can say none to be specified later.

Now, you may be asking yourself, well, what if I don't use Google Meet and you use something like Zoom, for example. Well, you could just come down here to the description and paste your Zoom link into this area as well. I'm just going to leave this blank in this particular example.

And the last step is to add it to my email. And now within my email, they can browse the available times and choose the one that is best suited for them.

Now, it may seem like there's a lot more available times here than what we selected, but remember we selected a number of 90 minute and two hour blocks and gave them half hour increments. So here are the half hour increments that you're seeing here on these two particular days.

Now you're probably wondering, does this only work with fellow Gmail users? And what does it look like to the end user? Let's go ahead and hit send on this email. And let me show you, we are now taking a look at what the receiver will see.

And as you can tell, yes, this does not just work for Gmail or other Google users, you can safely use this feature with - Anyone that you are wanting to meet with. In this example, I'm using outlook.com.

So I'm going to go ahead and open this email. And here you can see it's everything that we saw in our last screen, just the way that we set things up so they can come in here and browse the available times and say, yeah, you know, Wednesday at 2:00 PM that works for me.

If they click on that link in a new tab, they're going to be brought to this screen. Now, this is important because we want to confirm both their name and their email address for this particular event. This is especially helpful if for some reason that email got forwarded or sent to someone else.

So this is really just a confirmation step. And as mentioned before, if we had made this a phone call, they would also be required to input their phone number. At this stage, they can say, confirm.

Jumping back to my email here, you can see I have just received an email notification saying that this event has been confirmed for 2:00 PM and if I open up my Google calendar, here is this chat with Ted. 

Here is that meeting event. Now, one key thing that you will want to remember when it comes to sending out your availability, like the one that we did here in this example, it will not reserve any of those times on your calendar, nor will it check for any double bookings.

So for example, we made ourselves available or gave this individual available times of 7:00 AM through 9:00 AM on Friday. If I went ahead and booked other meetings or blocked out times within this two hour frame and then they chose one of these slots, it would still proceed with booking that calendar event.

So I would recommend that you limit the number of options that you give to your recipients, and also make sure that these are times that are going to remain open or remain available at least within the next 24 hours, so that they can safely select that time and book a meeting with you.

Now, if you're wanting to turn your calls and appointments into actual sales and new clients, I recommend checking out Pipedrive AI. Pipedrive AI gives your CRM almost magical abilities, including the option to analyze your entire sales pipeline and identify what is most valuable and what you should be working on next.

It also includes great AI features such as writing your own emails and replying to customers and summarizing their information so you can determine who should you be reaching out to Next, to get started with Pipedrive AI for free, and to receive a special bonus just for SimpliVity users, click the link in the description down below.

Do you want to make your Google sites faster, more interactive and easier to navigate? In this video I'm sharing with you seven tips that will save you hours of frustration and make your website so much better. Let's get started with tip number one, and that's starting with a brand new site.

Now of course, you don't have to start with a blank site. You can start with something that you've already used in the past or choose from a template, but don't forget you've got so much more than just the four or five templates that are available to you here.

If we come up and expand the template gallery, we've got so much more to choose from. Now, Google tries to make it helpful by putting these into different categories. We've got personal work, small business, and education, but don't let these headers fool you.

I've used many of these education sites for business purposes and I've used many of these work and small business templates for educational purposes. So before you get started with that new site, take a look around so you can get there that much faster.

Now the second tip, which is going to really make your website stand out, is taking a look at your navigation. 

Now by default, your menu is going to appear here in the top right hand corner. It may vary a little bit by the theme that you've chosen, but this isn't the only layout or the only color scheme which you can choose from.

If we come up here and hit the gear icon, navigation is the very first setting, and we can move that top navigation to a side navigation if we want. Now this is a great choice if you want to put all the attention and more focus on what you have here in the header and what's going on above the fold. You'll see that it becomes a collapsible menu here in the left hand side.

So we still have all the same pages, we have all the same menu options that we saw before, but it's going to be hidden in the left hand side. This is a fantastic choice if you are creating a portfolio or something else where you really want people to focus here on the main screen or your homepage, but remember, this is not the only option available to you.

Now, in my case, I'm going to go back to that top view because I do want people to see this, but also don't forget that you can change the color of your navigation menu by default. Most themes will have this set to transparent, meaning that you can see the text directly over the background image I have here, but maybe I want to change it to white. This makes it stand out that much more, especially when I have this darker image here.

You also have the choice to choose black if you like. In this particular example, I don't think it stands out quite as much, so I might go back to that white option here that really I think makes my menu stand out, something that might make it easier for my visitors to find exactly what they're looking for.

Now, staying here within settings for tip number three, we also want to take a moment to click on our brand images, and don't forget that you can upload your own logo and favicon.

Let's start with the logo by selecting upload. Here I can choose any image on my computer. Let's say that maybe this check mark is my logo, so you'll see that that will now appear here in the top left hand corner. And if you do have a logo that perhaps has your full name included, don't forget that. You can also edit and remove the text here for the name of your site.

If this logo, for example, had my full company name and was perhaps a little more horizontal and it would stretch out here, I would probably just remove my site name altogether and let the logo do the work. 

In my example here, maybe I'll just call this checkbox marketing. Maybe that's the name of my business. So I am going to add my name here as well, but there's a couple of other things that we want to pay attention to here.

Once you've uploaded your logo, there's another feature here that you may not have seen before. You can use one or more of the colors within your logo for the rest of your theme. Here you can see that I've got sort of this orangey color from my page, but if this is the color of my logo, why don't I use the exact same green?

Now I am pulling the green directly from my logo and everything else, even when I've got a few different shades, will be brought directly into my website. So already it's making it that much easier and that much faster for me to create or edit my existing site.

Lastly, still under brand images, we want to come down to our Fon. Now what exactly is a fon? Well, when you're browsing the web, you'll notice that there is almost always an image here to the left of each of the websites that you're on here.

You can see that since I'm in Google sites, I've got this mini Google Sites logo and I've got my live site here on the right hand side, which because I don't have a favicon, is also showing the Google Sites logo.

Well, that's a no-no, you don't want someone coming to your website and seeing this Google Site's logo. Let's go ahead and hit upload. I'm going to come back down here and select that checkbox again. And don't forget, you will have to hit publish for this to be applied to your website with my Google site now published. You can see that now I have that favi con listed here right beside my website.

And as always remember, you don't have to have the same logo that you use here within your menu. These can be completely different. They can be a different shade or a different color, but I would say uploading a favicon is a must have to make your website look professional.

Now, the next tip on our list has to do with adding information on any webpage, but only show it when someone wants to see it. And that involves adding a collapsible group. Here you can see under the insert menu, it actually happens to be the very first option under our content blocks, but I find that not enough people use this or make good use of it within their website.

I'm going to go ahead and select it. Here is going to be my collapsible block, and as always, if I want to move it up, maybe I want to have it here below my speakers here, I can add it here as well.

Now, there's two components to a collapsible group. The first one is to give it a title or a section heading. This is always going to be visible and you're going to want to make sure that you give it such a title that people will want to expand it or realize that there's more information underneath. 

So an FAQ section is a great option here. Maybe I'm going to punch this up by making it bold and I'm also going to make it centered here as well. You'll see then down below we have a click to edit text section, and this is where we can add our questions and our answers. Another really good use of this space is maybe you want to include a person's bio.

I don't know how many times I've been on a page and they've just dumped the entire speaker's bio or the founder's bio when maybe it's better if that information is optional. I don't want to see or read your entire backstory unless I want to click on something. But let's stay with our FAQ example here.

So I'm going to quickly copy and paste some information here into this section and then click outside of the box and you'll notice that all we see is the header. Let's go ahead and select publish and see what this is going to look like on the live page. Here we are on the live page and you'll see here is the FAQ section.

Now there is a down arrow here on the right hand side, but they actually don't have to click that. They can click anything within this space and it will expand. They can click again and it will collapse. So again, this is a great way to maximize your real estate on any webpage. If you don't feel that you need to share that information to everyone, only want to display it when people want to learn more, you can include a collapsible group just like this.

Next up, let's take a look at another feature that I don't think gets used either often enough or at least the right way. And that is an image carousel in particular. You can do a lot more than just add images. This can be a great tool for adding testimonials and quotes as well. So let's make sure you know how to use it right.

By selecting image carousel, we're first going to be prompted with which images do we want to add. And yes, in order for it to be a carousel, you must have at least two images. So I'm going to go ahead here and select images.

You can either upload them directly from your machine or you can select an image. In my case, I'm going to go straight to Google Images, and this is an event, so I'm going to search for audiences here, and I'm going to go and click on a few different ones. Maybe this one, this one, and I kind of like the way that this one looks as well.

So I've got four images. I'm going to go ahead and select insert. And of course, keep in mind you can always rearrange these images by just simply dragging them. Maybe I want this to be in the third position, so I'm going to go ahead and drag this over here. Now, first I'm going to go ahead and select insert, just so you can see what this looks like, but we're going to come back and adjust some of those settings.

Now, when you first insert an image carousel, it's probably not going to look great, just like the example here, it's much too large and it's also on the left hand side of the screen. 

So all you need to do is drag your blue dots, which you may be familiar with in other parts of Google sites as well. And I do want this to span the entire length of my page, so I'm going to go ahead and do that as well.

But there's a couple of other options that we have available to us. If you want to add captions, you can do so, and that will appear here in this white section down below. But you'll also notice by default, it's added these dots here at the bottom indicating the total number of images in my carousel. Well, I don't want either of these things, so let's go ahead and click on the carousel and then we'll click on settings. And then we want to come up here and click on the gear icon.

So number one, I'm going to turn off showing those dots. I don't want to show any captions. I haven't added any captions yet, but even if I did, I can turn that off here. I do want it to autostart, meaning I want it to move through those images when someone lands on that page.

And then we can also adjust the transition speed. Now I find that even medium is much too fast for my liking, so I'm going to slow that down a bit to slow, and I'm going to hit update already.

Even before we go to look at the live site, I think this looks a lot better. We don't have that caption space and we don't have those dots. I'm going to go ahead and hit publish and let's see what this looks like on the live site.

Now, when someone visits my website, you can come down below here and here is my image carousel, which is transitioning through naturally between the four images which I've selected. Now, if the user does choose to hover over the images, you will notice that we have the forward and back buttons available to us. So they will have the option to go back or to go forward, and as soon as they do, so that will pause the carousel.

This can be a great technique if you want to include testimonials or quotes or things that you want people to maybe read, and then they can go through either at their own pace or you can set up that automatic transition for when they first land on the website.

So don't ignore the power of an image carousel. It can bring a lot of great interactivity and excitement to your webpages.

Now, number six on our list, we are going to bring in the power of another Google application - And bring it directly into our website. And that is taking advantage of using Google forms. There's a very good chance that you want to create a contact page, or in this case, maybe I want to collect information from those who are thinking about attending my event. So for this, I'm going to come down to almost the very bottom of the insert tab, and I'm going to select forms. 

By opening up this tab, you have access to all of your Google forms, whether it's something you're currently using somewhere else or something that you've just created in the past. So in this example, I'm going to go ahead and select this. How can I help you form?

And all I need to do is come down to the bottom after I've selected the appropriate form and select insert. And what it's going to do is bring that form directly into my website. And just like other sections, we could drag this to other parts, but I want this at the bottom of my homepage.

Now, as we've seen before, we can still manipulate our form. So for example, if I do want to center it on the screen, which I think makes the most sense, I'm going to drag it over here. And now I have this form directly integrated with my website.

Now, the one bonus tip to keep in mind when embedding Google Forms into your Google site is to go ahead and stretch out that form to the bottom of the screen. Let me show you what I mean. If I was to leave it in this case, you can actually see that this isn't the end of the form, and therefore when someone comes to this page, they're going to see an additional scroll bar here, so they can access that form.

But by clicking on the form itself, we can take that blue.at the bottom, drag it down so we can see the next or the submit or whatever it is at the end of the form, and that will reduce the chances of any additional scroll bar appearing on the right hand side.

Now, my last and final tip may be the most helpful of them all, especially if you've taken the time to customize logos and layouts and colors and everything else on a particular page. When we come over to the themes tab here, you know that you can quickly transition between a number of different themes, but did you know you can create your own custom theme so you can use this again and again and build those new websites even faster?

Here under custom, we're going to select that plus button here, and I'm going to call this my event theme. Maybe every time that I create a new event, I want to use this theme. And here we can make some other selections here as well. So for example, maybe I'm always going to use that particular logo, so I'm going to upload it.

Now, maybe there's a particular banner image that you want to place here when you are starting with a new page or with a new website. I'm going to leave this off in my example, but you can choose to add one yourself. I'm going to select next, and we can either go from a selection of preset colors or we can choose custom colors. 

So you probably already have two or three custom colors related to your logo or related to your brand. Here is where you can come in here and choose and copy and paste your hex code directly into these fields. I'm going to go ahead and select next.

And then the last choice we have here is selecting our custom fonts, and we have a difference between our titles and our headings and also our body text. So I'm going to select maybe Georgia in this case.

And now not only has it been applied to my existing website, but I can continue to make custom adjustments here, whether that be the colors that we looked at, maybe there are particular images, navigations, all of these things are now adjustable, and I can save and repurpose this theme in the future.

Now, I'd love to hear from you next. What is your favorite tip when it comes to creating websites with Google sites? Be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.

Stop. Are you wanting to create a fillable form like the one you see here, where people get to enter in information and then have to save it and then upload it and then send it back to you? Well then this video isn't for you because in this video I'm going to show you how to turn any document or PDF into an actual online form in just minutes so you don't have to waste your time collecting and reviewing each PD F1 by one.

Instead, you can collect information in real time in a table like this. And best of all, you can do all of this absolutely for free. So let me show you how to get started. We're going to go over to jot form.com and make use of their smart PDF forms.

Now, the best thing about this is that you can turn any PDF or document into a fillable form. It will convert it in just a matter of seconds. And not only can people access it on any device, have you tried filling out A PDF on your mobile phone, but you can collect that information in an easy to use table, but keep your PDF format.

So let's go up here and we're going to say try now and we're going to create our first form together. Now, you don't have to start with A PDF, you can simply start with a doc or a Doc X, and you don't have to put in anything complicated either. Let me show you what I mean. In my example, I'm going to be using this PDF, which I simply created in Google Docs, and you'll notice that nothing is fillable here. 

In fact, these are just underscores on my keyboard. I've simply included the different headers and the different areas that I want to be filled in. And then I just used underscore to create a line within this document. Anyone can do this in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, or if you want, you can take an existing PDF and do this as well.

So going back to my JotForm account, I'm simply going to select upload document, and I'm going to go find that exact PDF that I just showed you a moment ago. And not only is it uploading it to my account, but it's actually going to convert it as well. Yes, you can see here on the right hand side, it's already created a fillable form here. This is my original PDF, but on the left hand side, it has already gone ahead and created a true online form for me to start using.

Now it may not be absolutely perfect, but all we need to do is make a few tweaks and then we can send people this actual form, which is linked to my PDF and make it that much easier for both them and also myself. So here, starting on the right hand side, we have our original PDF, and you can see that it's already identified the different areas that we need to fill in. And in fact, if I click on any of these, it will help me in showing which thing it has linked to over here on my online form.

So if I click on, for example, this date area here, it's going to draw a simple little line and sort of highlight - These two things together. And yes, it's even correctly identified things that need a date field, the start date, the end date, and then down below here under the signature, this date area as well.

Now of course it may not be absolutely perfect, but Jot form makes it very easy for us to edit this. For example, there's two things that I'm going to want to adjust. Number one, it didn't seem to pick up on this fixed price amount. And number two here, you can see that it has identified this signature area, but it's not a signature box. We're going to change that here as well.

Let's start with this fixed price amount. So under my deliverables here, I want to add a new element. So up in the top left hand corner, I'm going to select add form elements, and here's the variety of different elements in which I can add to my form.

Now you may think that I want to add a short text field. It's not a bad idea, but we're talking about numbers, we're talking about pricing. I don't want to allow people to add in text or to write in a name. I only want to allow them to add in numbers. So I'm going to choose this number element here and simply drag it onto my form. 

And then here at the top you can see I can match it with what is the area going to be on my original PDF. And yes, of course it's going to be my fixed price amount. So over here under number, I can say this is my fixed price amount. So it matches with what's on my PDF over here. And now within this field, they can only enter in a number when they enter in their pricing amount.

Now below you'll see that we have this freelancer area here, but I really want to collect a signature instead. So what I'm going to do in this case is I'm actually going to remove it. I'm going to come back to my add form element and you will notice that yes, we have the ability to add a signature so I can place it in here. And yes, we can drag and drop these elements up and down to wherever we need to.

Once again, on the right hand side, I'm just going to drag it over here to my signature box. I can change the length or the size of it if I need to, and perfect. I actually don't need to do anything else. It already has the signature title here so they know what to do. And now people can go ahead and sign this form.

Now in my example here, I'm happy with a fairly basic form, but don't forget, you can add your own logos if you like. We can come over here to the form designer panel and change our entire theme if we want to add colors and change our fonts and everything else. But for this example, I'm going to keep things relatively basic. The next thing that we can do is come over here to our settings and if we want to give the name a particular title and look at some of the other integrations or maybe some of the other options that we have available to us, one of them could be the thank you page. For example, if you want to give a customized thank you or perhaps redirect - Them to somewhere else on your website.

But let's get to that published phase 'cause I want to show you what this is going to look and feel like for the people that you send this to. Here we have our custom link, which I'm simply going to copy and let's paste it into our browser. And this is exactly what they will see. So again, you can choose whatever title you want here. It's actually going to show the original PDF, so they know that they're getting an official document or perhaps they've used this document or seen this document before in the past. I'm going to select start filing. And now we have this fillable, actual fillable online form which they can access on any device. And best of all, they don't have to remember this complicated date format. We've actually given them something a lot more convenient, like a calendar date picker here. 

Here they can enter in their name and other deliverables that need to be provided. Remember our fixed price amount column here I am attempting to type in letters here. It won't allow me to because I want them to only add in pricing information.

And then yes, we have that signature field, which is super easy for them to fill out as well. Now down below, they can submit it right away, but they can also preview the PDF as well. And this is the additional bonus because it's giving you and your clients the best of both worlds.

Not only can they easily fill out this PDF, but here you can see they can have a saved copy for themselves. Here are the dates in which they filled in. Here's that fixed price amount, and it even has their signature, which is date stamped at the time in which they signed that document. They can go ahead and download and save this document if they want, or they can go back to the form and then hit submit at this case.

Now jumping back to my Jot form account, I'm going to select the form that we just created and I'm going to select submissions. And here I have all of that information available to me, including their signature, including everything that they included. Now as those forms are filled out, I get to view and collect and analyze all that information in a helpful table.

No more do I have to open up the documents which they've emailed or uploaded to me and look at each and every individual field. Trust me, the days of fillable traditional PDF forms are over.

Now to get started creating and converting your own PDFs to online forms, just go to jot form.com or click the link in the description down below. And if you have any other questions on how you can simplify your software and make things easier for you and the people you serve, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple. - Stop.

Are you wanting to create a fillable form like the one you see here, where people get to enter in information and then have to save it and then upload it and then send it back to you?

Well then this video isn't for you because in this video I'm going to show you how to turn any document or PDF into an actual online form in just minutes so you don't have to waste your time collecting and reviewing each PD F1 by one.

Instead, you can collect information in real time in a table like this. And best of all, you can do all of this absolutely for free.

So let me show you how to get started. We're going to go over to jot form.com and make use of their smart PDF forms. Now, the best thing about this is that you can turn any PDF or document into a fillable form. It will convert it in just a matter of seconds. 

And not only can people access it on any device, have you tried filling out A PDF on your mobile phone, but you can collect that information in an easy to use table, but keep your PDF format.

So let's go up here and we're going to say try now and we're going to create our first form together. Now, you don't have to start with A PDF, you can simply start with a doc or a Doc X, and you don't have to put in anything complicated either.

Let me show you what I mean. In my example, I'm going to be using this PDF, which I simply created in Google Docs, and you'll notice that nothing is fillable here. In fact, these are just underscores on my keyboard. I've simply included the different headers and the different areas that I want to be filled in. And then I just used underscore to create a line within this document. Anyone can do this in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, or if you want, you can take an existing PDF and do this as well.

So going back to my JotForm account, I'm simply going to select upload document, and I'm going to go find that exact PDF that I just showed you a moment ago. And not only is it uploading it to my account, but it's actually going to convert it as well.

Yes, you can see here on the right hand side, it's already created a fillable form here. This is my original PDF, but on the left hand side, it has already gone ahead and created a true online form for me to start using. Now it may not be absolutely perfect, but all we need to do is make a few tweaks and then we can send people this actual form, which is linked to my PDF and make it that much easier for both them and also myself.

So here, starting on the right hand side, we have our original PDF, and you can see that it's already identified the different areas that we need to fill in. And in fact, if I click on any of these, it will help me in showing which thing it has linked to over here on my online form. So if I click on, for example, this date area here, it's going to draw a simple little line and sort of highlight - These two things together.

And yes, it's even correctly identified things that need a date field, the start date, the end date, and then down below here under the signature, this date area as well. Now of course it may not be absolutely perfect, but Jot form makes it very easy for us to edit this. For example, there's two things that I'm going to want to adjust. Number one, it didn't seem to pick up on this fixed price amount. And number two here, you can see that it has identified this signature area, but it's not a signature box.

We're going to change that here as well. Let's start with this fixed price amount. So under my deliverables here, I want to add a new element. So up in the top left hand corner, I'm going to select add form elements, and here's the variety of different elements in which I can add to my form.

Now you may think that I want to add a short text field. It's not a bad idea, but we're talking about numbers, we're talking about pricing. I don't want to allow people to add in text or to write in a name. I only want to allow them to add in numbers.

So I'm going to choose this number element here and simply drag it onto my form. And then here at the top you can see I can match it with what is the area going to be on my original PDF. And yes, of course it's going to be my fixed price amount. So over here under number, I can say this is my fixed price amount. So it matches with what's on my PDF over here. And now within this field, they can only enter in a number when they enter in their pricing amount.

Now below you'll see that we have this freelancer area here, but I really want to collect a signature instead. So what I'm going to do in this case is I'm actually going to remove it. I'm going to come back to my add form element and you will notice that yes, we have the ability to add a signature so I can place it in here. And yes, we can drag and drop these elements up and down to wherever we need to.

Once again, on the right hand side, I'm just going to drag it over here to my signature box. I can change the length or the size of it if I need to, and perfect. I actually don't need to do anything else. It already has the signature title here so they know what to do. And now people can go ahead and sign this form.

Now in my example here, I'm happy with a fairly basic form, but don't forget, you can add your own logos if you like. We can come over here to the form designer panel and change our entire theme if we want to add colors and change our fonts and everything else. But for this example, I'm going to keep things relatively basic.

The next thing that we can do is come over here to our settings and if we want to give the name a particular title and look at some of the other integrations or maybe some of the other options that we have available to us, one of them could be the thank you page. For example, if you want to give a customized thank you or perhaps redirect - Them to somewhere else on your website.

But let's get to that published phase 'cause I want to show you what this is going to look and feel like for the people that you send this to. Here we have our custom link, which I'm simply going to copy and let's paste it into our browser. And this is exactly what they will see. 

So again, you can choose whatever title you want here. It's actually going to show the original PDF, so they know that they're getting an official document or perhaps they've used this document or seen this document before in the past. I'm going to select start filing.

And now we have this fillable, actual fillable online form which they can access on any device. And best of all, they don't have to remember this complicated date format. We've actually given them something a lot more convenient, like a calendar date picker here. Here they can enter in their name and other deliverables that need to be provided.

Remember our fixed price amount column here I am attempting to type in letters here. It won't allow me to because I want them to only add in pricing information. And then yes, we have that signature field, which is super easy for them to fill out as well.

Now down below, they can submit it right away, but they can also preview the PDF as well. And this is the additional bonus because it's giving you and your clients the best of both worlds. Not only can they easily fill out this PDF, but here you can see they can have a saved copy for themselves. Here are the dates in which they filled in. Here's that fixed price amount, and it even has their signature, which is date stamped at the time in which they signed that document. They can go ahead and download and save this document if they want, or they can go back to the form and then hit submit at this case.

Now jumping back to my Jot form account, I'm going to select the form that we just created and I'm going to select submissions. And here I have all of that information available to me, including their signature, including everything that they included.

Now as those forms are filled out, I get to view and collect and analyze all that information in a helpful table. No more do I have to open up the documents which they've emailed or uploaded to me and look at each and every individual field. Trust me, the days of fillable traditional PDF forms are over.

Now to get started creating and converting your own PDFs to online forms, just go to jot form.com or click the link in the description down below. And if you have any other questions on how you can simplify your software and make things easier for you and the people you serve, be sure to let me know in the comments down below.

Thank you so much for watching, and remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.