Google Apps Tips: Nested Labels

Using Nested Labels

Labels are far more flexible and powerful than folders. While a single email message can only reside in single folder, with Google Mail, a single message can be associated with multiple labels. Attaching a label, or multiple labels to an email message, provides another option to quickly locate the message by visually scanning through your Inbox for a particular label or by searching for the label name along with other criteria. And searching for messages is so much quicker than hunting through hundreds of folders to find the message you’re looking for.

While labels and searching are a far more efficient way to find your email messages, many users miss the hierarchy of nested folders. So, Google Apps has released a cool new lab called “Nested Labels”. The Nested Labels lab enables you define a label hierarchy to help you sort your email.

Step 1: Enable the Nested Labels Lab

To use the Nested Labels lab, you must first enable it.

1. If you haven’t yet enabled labs, click Settings then Labs. If you have already enabled at least one lab, you should see a green beaker to the left of Settings. Click the beaker for a direct shortcut to Labs.
2. Enable the Nested Labels lab.
3. Save your changes.

Understanding Nested Labels:
To use the Nested Labels lab, you will need to rename those labels for which you wish to create the hierarchy. But first, let’s examine how to set up your label hierarchy. In our example below, notice that we have several labels defined for our projects (Proj:). Also notice that the Hanes projects contains two different entries for Los Angeles (LA) and New York (NYC).

To define your hierarchy, just insert a slash (/) when creating the label to define a new sub-level. For example, you may want to call your first level “Projects” and then define “Garrett”, “Hanes” and “Jones” as sub-levels of “Projects”. So, your first level would look something like this:

Projects
Projects/Garrett
Projects/Hanes
Projects/Jones

To define a second sub-level for Los Angeles and New York, create two sub-level labels beneath Hanes called “Projects/Hanes/LA” and “Projects/Hanes/NYC”:

Projects
Projects/Garrett
Projects/Hanes
Projects/Hanes/LA
Projects/Hanes/NYC
Projects/Jones

Step 2: Creating a new Top Level Label

In our example, we first need to create a top level or ‘Parent’ label. Since all of our current labels relate to projects, we’ll create a new ‘Parent’ label called “Projects”.

There are multiple ways to create a new label:

1. You probably have a link in the labels section called something like “4 more”, as in our example. The number refers to the number of hidden labels. Click on the link.
2. Click Create new label.
3. Define the name of your label in the ‘New Label’ dialog.
4. Click OK.

Optionally, you can also create the new label by clicking Settings > Labels. Then, define the new label in the ‘Create a new label’ field.

Step 3: Renaming Existing Labels

There are are several ways to rename your existing labels:

1. Click the drop-down arrow to the left of the existing label.
2. Click Rename.
3. Define the name of your label in the ‘Rename Label’ dialog.
4. Click OK.

Optionally, you can also rename a label by clicking Settings > Labels. Select the label in the Labels section and rename it. Using this option, create a second sub-level for “Hanes” using a second slash.

Let’s see how our cool new nested labels look. The first image displays the “Projects” label fully extended. Different colors were also applied to the label levels. The second image displays the “Projects” label collapsed. To collapse the label, just click the minus sign to the left of the label name. Yep, Nested Labels are pretty cool!

Note:

The Nested Label lab doesn’t work well with the “Hide Read Labels” lab. If you have that lab enabled, you might want to disable it before creating and using nested labels.