Sidepanel

On a PC or Mac, on the right side of the screen in Gmail or Drive (or a particular document, spreadsheet, or presentation file), Google provides a side panel that lets you quickly view your calendar, any notes you have in Keep, and a task list. Additionally, in Gmail, you can see information related to the contacts involved in the conversation.

If you have some third-party applications (Trello, Salesforce, etc.) you may be able to add them to the side panel also.

Of the Google-provided options, Tasks is unique in that it does not have its own separate desktop application to use (that is, you can't select Tasks as an option in the nine-dot grid of applications in Google Workspace and you can't go to tasks.google.com). For this reason, Google Tasks is covered on a different page of this website.

Calendar

Click the Calendar option in the side panel to see the current day's appointments and events from across all the calendars currently visible in Google Calendar (you can change which ones you see from the panel itself).

    • When you create an event here while in Gmail, Google uses the subject of the currently-selected message as the event name.

    • When you create an event here while in a Docs/Sheets/Slides file, Google uses the title of that file as the event name.

    • When you create an event here while in Drive (while not viewing a specific file), Google does not provide an event name automatically.

Keep Notes

Click Keep to see the notes you have taken in Google Keep.

    • When you add a note from this view in Gmail, the content of the related email message is automatically attached to it.

    • When you add a note from this view in a Docs/Sheets/Slides file, Google attaches the document.

    • When you add a note from this view in Drive (while not viewing a specific file), Google makes no assumptions about what you want.

Contacts

Click Contacts to view information about the persons involved in a given conversation. You can see: contact details that you have and the most recent interactions you've had with those contacts. You can also send an email or chat to just that contact, schedule a meeting, or start a video call.