Being among the most popular email services in the world, Gmail doesn’t only offer a simple and easy to use solution when it comes to receiving and reading mail, but also a number of formatting options to utilize when writing new messages.
Whether it’s changing the font size and style, bolding and underlining text, or even aligning the body, Gmail offers more advanced formatting choices that you might expect to see in any word processing program. If you want to utilize these handy features, here is how you can format your emails in Gmail:
Table of Contents
Accessing the formatting options on a computer
To locate all the available formatting options in Gmail when using your computer, simply follow the steps below:
- On your computer, open the Gmail website in your preferred browser, and sign in if necessary.
- Click on the Compose button in the top-left corner.
- When the new email window opens, the formatting toolbar should be at the bottom, opened by click on the A underlined icon. You can see all the available features here.
Accessing the formatting options on a mobile device
If you’re using Gmail on your smartphone or tablet, however, here’s how you can find the formatting options:
- On your mobile device, load the Gmail application and sign in if necessary.
- Press the Compose button at the bottom of the screen, and then enter the text of your email.
- Now, highlight the part of the text that you wish to format.
- The formatting options will then appear above the selected text.
Available formatting features
In the desktop version of Gmail, you will have quite a few formatting options available to make your emails that much easier and more interesting to read.
After the undo and redo arrows, the first icon in the formatting toolbar is the font style, where you could choose between 11 different fonts for your messages, while the second icon represents the size of the font, ranging from small to huge.
The next three icons represented by letters B, I, and U will allow you to bold, italicize, or underline your text, respectively. The icon following them (A underlined) gives you the opportunity to change both the font and the background color.
The following icon, consisting of five horizontal lines, represents the alignment of your text, whether left, right or center.
This is followed by two options for creating lists, the first one numbered, and the second one bulleted.
However, that’s not all. If you click on the down arrow at the end of the formatting toolbar, you will be able to access a few more features, such as strikethrough, indentation options, as well as quotations.
Note: The formatting options on mobile devices, however, will be limited to bolding, italicizing, underlining, and changing the color of the text.
And that’s it! Now you know all the formatting options that are available in Gmail, as well as different ways to access them, depending on the device you’re currently using.
