How do I sign into a
different Gmail account? Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. It's not uncommon for people
to have more than one Gmail account. I know I have a few. There's two I use primarily, but I've got some others for testing,
as we will see here in a moment. The problem, though,
is that when you're logged in to one and you want to use the other,
how do you get there from here? I'm going to give you three
approaches to the problem. The one that is the easiest, the one that
is the most commonly used,
and then the one that I use instead. That's not for everybody. The first one is actually very simple. Here we are in Gmail. This is the askleotest@gmail. Com account. If I wanted to sign into a different account, all I would have
to do is sign out of this one. And then use another account, use my AskLeo Test2 account,
and boom, I'm now in the second account. This would be one way to switch between accounts if you don't spend a lot
of time switching back and forth. This
is a great way to just use this account for a while and then use that same
technique to use the other account. Now, that's the first approach. Like I said, it's probably the easiest,
but it's also probably the least useful. The more useful approach is actually
now supported by Google themselves. They didn't use to, but they do now,
and that's simply this. If I now click on my profile icon, you'll see that there are not
just my AskLeoTest2@gmail.com but Askleotest@gmail.
Com. In other words, it
remembered the account
that I had signed into originally. All I need to do here is click in Sign in,
and once again, It's asking me to sign
in with that account, and boom. I have a new tab with the other account. So this way, right now,
we're taking a look at askleotest@gmail. Com. however, over here, askleotest2@gmail.
Com. These are two different accounts that I can interact with simultaneously
if I want to. They're just in two different tabs. Now,
there is something that I'm going to call the
catch of using multiple tabs
for multiple accounts in a single browser. That's simply this. Google is a lot more than just Gmail. If I go over here to you, Ye Old Waffle icon, and I decide
I want to go look at Google Drive. Google Drive is here somewhere. There it is. I'll click on Google Drive. Two things will happen. One, it will open a new tab
on Google Drive, but it will do so for whichever account
I happened to be in at the time. Since I was looking at Ask Leo Test 2, at At the time, I hit
the Waffle
icon in the upper right-hand corner. The Google Drive window that opened
up is associated with Ask Leo Test 2. Great. That means, of course,
that if I go over to Ask Leo Test and I do the same thing, I can open up Google Drive
here, and I now have two emails open up, one for Ask Leo Test
and one for Ask Leo Test 2. I have two Google drives opened up, one for Ask Leo Test
and one for Ask Leo Test 2. It is incredibly easy to forget
and open up the wrong one. For example, you notice I'v
e
got a couple of documents here. Well, let's say we're back here and I want to get those documents, but the last
email I read was in Ask Leo Test 2. Now, I want to go to Google Drive
to see those documents. I forget that I'm in the wrong account. I hit the Waffle, I hit Google Drive,
and my files aren't there. Well, the reason they're not there is
I'm looking at the wrong account. What I need to do is go back over
to the account that has them, the Ask Leo test account,
and do the Waffle icon th
ere. Sure enough, there are my files. The other thing you could do,
if you are so inclined, is say I'm going to open up contacts here,
which This is another common thing to use. These are the contacts associated with Ask
Leo Test 2, since that's where I started. The other approach to getting to the other set of contacts
is to click on the profile icon in the upper right,
and now click on the other account. That will also open up another tab
on the same feature, in this case, contacts, but on the
account
that you clicked on. And this one has something in the contacts, and this one doesn't,
so we know they're different. So this is,
I would call it the recommended approach. It is the most flexible. It lets you use basically any service on any Gmail account
simultaneously in a single browser. Works great. You just have to keep track
of which account you're working in as you traverse all of these
different different tabs. My approach is a little different. In fact, I'll call it a bit of a b
lend. I do have one browser open
that has my personal Gmail, but if I also need to take a look
at a Gmail account for someone else, like, say, my wife's Gmail account,
I'll do this. I will open it up
as another tab in the same browser. However, I have another browser open, and in that browser,
I have my work account. I have my work accounts because,
of course, there's many. This is me managing how
I interact with things. I have one browser dedicated to non-work things and another browser
dedicat
ed to work things. That implies, of course,
that I have two browsers installed. Well, actually, I have five browsers
installed, but that's a different story. The bottom line here is that if I want to do something on my personal stuff, I go
to my brave installation and fire that up. If I want to go do something on Ask Leo, I fire up Chrome, and that's the default
there is it will open up my work accounts. In fact, I have a third one. Because I do some work for a nonprofit,
I have Firefox installe
d, and it's set up to default to all
of the nonprofits' accounts. That's another way of managing all this, is to simply use separate
browsers for separate worlds. It works really well, but I can still use the multi tab
interface, the multiple accounts interface that I've shown you here as another way
to basically deal with other accounts without necessarily needing
to fire up yet another browser. So now, hopefully you've got some good
ideas on different ways that you can manage multiple Gmail ac
counts and pick
the approach that works the best for you. If nothing else, I would have you start with the multiple accounts in the same
browser, solution number 2. For updates, for comments, for links related to this
topic and more, visit askleo.com/168937. I'm Leo Notenboom, and this is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.
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