I’d bet that when you think about Outlook, you think of using it for your work emails or maybe your Microsoft personal accounts. I used to think of Outlook the same way until I added my Gmail accounts to Outlook and discovered a number of great features.

It’s Easy To Send Emails From Different Email Accounts

One of the first features I discovered was how easy it was to send a new email message from different email addresses. By simply selecting the drop-down in the email send window, I have the option of selecting which email account I’d like to send from.

If I were to do the same thing in Gmail, it would take me multiple steps: first I would have to switch accounts, and then I could compose a new email message; in Outlook, all I need to do is select the appropriate account from a drop-down menu, and I’m all set.

Although this may seem like a minor flow improvement, I personally can’t overstate how often I use this feature.

Creating Email Signatures Is More Streamlined

Whether I’m sending emails from my personal or business email accounts, signatures are a vital piece I like to include at the end of any communication. As with switching between email accounts when sending out a new email message, managing email signatures for my different email accounts is much easier with Outlook.

By simply setting up a Signature under the Signature settings, I can customize what I would like to include in my signature—whether that is text along with graphics, or just text.

It certainly beats having to switch between Gmail accounts in a browser to do the same thing.

Having the ability to quickly and easily change the email signature for multiple email accounts is a massive time saver.

Separated Folders For Each Email Account

Although Gmail typically uses labels to organize email messages instead of the traditional folder structure of Microsoft, they both play nicely with each other in Outlook.

When a Gmail account is added into Outlook, the labels are added as a folder into that respective Gmail account section—this saves you time, since you don’t have to organize all the labels into folders yourself or worry about emails not being carried over and organized correctly. If you do need to move something around, moving an email to the respective folder is as easy as dragging and dropping (or right-clicking) the email in whichever folder you’d like.

You can switch between Gmail accounts in a browser, but the Outlook interface offers a more convenient way of accessing emails from multiple accounts, especially since they’re neatly sorted into folders.

Managing Multiple Gmail Calendars Is More Streamlined

When it comes to managing Gmail calendars across multiple Gmail accounts, Outlook excels (no pun intended). It allows you to easily create a new meeting in different Gmail calendars much more easily than you could do in one Gmail instance. In Outlook, if I want to create a new meeting, all I have to do is select the drop-down menu and choose the appropriate calendar for the meeting. With one click, you can select which calendar you’d like to add the new event, task, or meeting to, saving you time and clicks.

When all is said and done, using Outlook to manage my emails and calendar has saved me hours over the years, simply because I don’t have to switch between accounts to manage my emails and calendars. If you haven’t tried using Outlook to streamline your email and calendar-related tasks, you definitely should—it might save you some time.