How to: Add an RSS Feed to your iGoogle Home Page

I have been using Google Apps now for close on 3 years and have been accessing it via a web browser the whole time.  My home page has always been Google but I recently changed it to iGoogle so that I can configure some handy Gadgets for easy access to my most used items.

In my management of keeping stuff out of the Inbox I set up some RSS Feeds instead of subscribing to some newsletters.  The great thing is you can add RSS Feeds right onto your iGoogle page.

Heres how:

1. Open iGoogle
2. Press the Add Gadgets button
3. On the top right look for the 'Search for gadgets' box and type RSS and press 'Search' button
4. The first entry should be Google Reader.  Press 'Add it now' button.
5. Now configure the RSS feed in Google Reader by adding the relevant link.

Want to know more about how iGoogle can improve your business productivity then contact me.

Another New Feature for Gmail: Drag and drop attachments onto messages

Looking for ways to save time?  Who isn't!

Suppose you want to attach some files to an email, and you already have a folder open containing those files.


You used to have to click "Attach a file," find the photos, click them, etc.  If you're using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox 3.6, you can just drag and drop the files to attach them.



For now, you can drag and drop attachments in Chrome and Firefox only.

New Feature for Gmail: Nested Labels and Message Sneak Peek

Looking for a way to organise your Labels in Gmail?  Here is a new feature just for you!

Labels are more flexible than folders because a given email can have several labels but can't be in several folders at the same time. A highly requested feature for labels, though, comes from the world of folders: the ability to organize labels hierarchically.

If you think this might be useful to you, go to the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, look for "Nested Labels," enable it and click "Save." You'll then need to name your label with slashes (/) to make it the child of another. For example, let's say you wanted to create a simple hierarchy with a "Home" label, and inside it a "Family" and a "Vacation" label. Just create three labels with the following names:

Home
Home/Family
Home/Vacation

You can then create "Home/Family/Kids," "Home/Pets," etc., to get something like the screenshot on the left. If you had the parent label "Home" before you don't have to create it from scratch.

You can create complex hierarchies of labels if that's the way you like to organize your mail, and you can expand/collapse labels to save space. You'll always be able to tell whether a given label contains unread messages in its collapsed child labels by looking at whether it's bold or not.

Please note that this lab doesn't play nicely with the "Hide Read Labels" lab. You might not get exactly what you expect if you have both labs enabled; for example, the collapse/expand icons won't always appear when they should.

Another highly requested feature is the ability to preview messages to get a glimpse on what they contain and maybe take immediate action without opening them.

This is exactly what "Message Sneak Peek" does. After you turn it on, right-clicking on a line in your inbox shows a preview pane with the message in it.


You can also use keyboard shortcuts for a faster sneak-peeking flow (enable keyboard shortcuts in Settings first if you haven't done so): hit 'h' to open a sneak peek card, then navigate with 'j' and 'k,' and dismiss the current card by pressing "Escape." Messages you peak at will stay unread (or it wouldn't really be a sneak peek, would it?).

How to: Access Google Docs’ Real-Time Editing, Drawing Features

There’s a whole bunch of new stuff in Google Docs, including real-time editing, a drawing tool, and a new look and features for spreadsheets and presentations. Not all of it is apparent and visible to returning Docs users, though.

Google Operating System’s app-by-app rundown shows how to enable the new document editing in the Settings, to activate Drawing from the “Create New” button, and hit the menu bar for a crisper spreadsheet view. If you’ve had some time to play with the new Docs tools, tell us what you think of them in the comments. [Google Operating System]