Imagine getting a written letter from your grandma and being able to push a button and generate a response that’s fundamentally identical to your last warm, loving letter to her. Add a few updated sentences at the end along with a comment about the latest weather, and you’re done. Easy.
Okay, so most people wouldn’t do this, but it’s surprising how often we take a similar approach with our communications, from Christmas letters (form letter printed + a handwritten sentence or two) to bulk email form letters to potential customers. Not so personal, but darn efficient, allowing you to send mail to dozens – or hundreds – of people with just a little bit of work.
Unless you’re using Gmail, in which case there isn’t any built-in support for templates of any sort. There’s barely support for signatures, though that’s improved over the years. Except now in Gmail there’s an advanced template feature that’s quite slick and might just be a game changer for how you use the popular email service. Let’s check it out…
ENABLE GMAIL TEMPLATES
Before you can proceed, you have to enable templates in your Gmail settings. Fire up Gmail in a Web browser (gmail.com) and click on the gear icon to go to Settings. It starts with a mini-view, but there’s a link to “See all settings”. Click on that and go to the “Advanced” area:
There are a couple of interesting features worth considering, but for templates, enable “Templates”, as shown above.
CREATING A GMAIL TEMPLATE
With that enabled, the easiest way to create a template is to simply open up a Compose window and type in the skeleton of the message you want to have a click away. I answer lots of email queries, so here’s what I’ll set up as my response template:
Looks good so I’m going to click on the “•••” button (it’s vertically oriented, not horizontal) on the bottom toolbar. This brings up a menu that includes all the formatting options not otherwise shown in the window and just a bit more:
Some interesting options, but I’m going to click on “Templates” to bring up a sub-menu:
That’s a lot of overlapping menus, isn’t it? I like to think of this as the “montage” view!
Anyway, I’m going to “Save as new template” causing it to prompt for a template name…
The text is jarringly big compared to the rest of the Gmail interface, but it’s only something you’ll see while creating templates, so it’s no big deal. I’ll use “ADT Reply” as the name, click “Save” and it’s done.
USING A SAVED GMAIL TEMPLATE
I deleted that unsent email and launched a new, blank, Compose window. This time when I click on the “•••” button, the template submenu’s a bit different:
This time the Templates submenu lists my templates. A click to choose “ADT Reply” and everything returns, with a bit of a surprise bonus feature:
What surprised me was that the name of the template is applied as the subject of the unsent message. It’s not a great design since UI’s should surprise you, but knowing that’s how it works suggests that longer template names are going to be an additional help.
All in all, a relatively crude implementation of templates (no editing, no renaming, no ability to have wildcards or variables), but still a lot better than typing the same thing endlessly. Give it a try, let me know how it works for you!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Google for many years and have an extensive Gmail and Google Tools Help area. Please check it out to find lots of additional tutorials and guides while you’re here. Thanks!
