Congratulations!  You have just created your first appointment in Google Calendar.  But wait…it only created it for an hour…and this is a 2-hour meeting!  Now what???  No problem!!

 

1.  Put your mouse at the bottom of the 1-hour time box.  You will see a little the arrow turn to a straight up-and-down line with an arrow at both ends.
2.  Left-click the mouse and hold down, and drag it down for an additional hour.

 

Congratulations!  You have just edited your first appointment!!  But wait…I wanted to invite someone to that meeting…now what?  No problem!!

 

1.  Put your mouse over the event and click once.  A white pop up box will display.  Click "Edit Event>>"
2.  Look on the right side of the screen for "Add: Guests".  Type the name of someone you work with, and when you see their name, click on it.
3.  You will see their name added below.  To remove them, click on the "x" to the right of their name.
4.  Now that you have someone in your guest list, click on "Suggested times" just below their name.  You will see a white pop up box that tells you if your guest list is free for your meeting.  It will also show you other suggested times and how many of your guests are available.
5.  To see a visual representation of this, click on the "Find a time" tab near the upper left side of the screen.  You will now see your calendar as well as the other person's calendar.   This is very helpful when trying to schedule with a large number of people.  NOTE:  You will not see why another person is not available, just that they are busy.  
6.  If you were really inviting this person, you could click "Save" at the top, and they would be notified of the meeting.  But since this is just a test, let's click "Discard changes" and these changes will be discarded.

 

Congratulations!!  You have just (well, almost) invited someone to a meeting!!

 

Enjoy!!

1.  You will see a copy of this message in your Inbox in Google.  
2.  Click on it. You will now see the message in Google.
3.  Look near the bottom of the message for the box that says "Click here to Reply or Forward".
4.  Click in this box and type "I received your message!"
5.  Click the blue "Send" button.
 
Congratulations!  You have just replied to your first message in Google!  But wait…something looks different…

 

1.  You will see this reply directly under the original message…and it looks like one message, but it's not!!  This is what Google calls "Conversations."  It is an attempt to keep all e-mail messages that relate to the same subject together.  It takes a little bit to get used to Conversations, but once you do, you'll wonder how you ever managed all of the replies to messages in the same topic!

2.  If you click on the red "Inbox" label on the left, you will be returned to your Inbox.  
3.  You should see something like "me(2)" as the "From" person.  This says that the message was from you, and there are 2 messages in this conversation.  It really does help streamline your Inbox and keep related messages together, but it can be a little challenging to understand at first.
4.  If you really don't like Conversations, you can turn them off.  Click on the little round gear icon in the upper right corner, and select "Settings."  Look in the middle of the page for "Conversation View" and click it to "Conversation view off".  Scroll down to the bottom and click "Save Changes".  You will be returned to the Inbox and you'll see all of your messages in a non-conversation view.
 
Congratulations!  You have just made the first configuration change to Google.  You can explore these settings at your leisure and customize Gmail to be exactly how you want it.  The good news is that these customizations follow you everywhere…so no matter what computer you use, your Gmail will always look and feel the same.  It doesn't matter if you're at work, at home, at a conference…your Gmail will always be the same.  
 
Enjoy!!