If you have a gmail email, then you already have a Google account. They are really the same thing.

Google Account

A Google Account is a user account that is required for access, authentication and authorization to certain online Google services, including Gmail, Google+, Google Hangouts and Blogger. A wide variety of Google products do not require an account, including Google Search, Youtube, Google Books, Google Finance and Google Maps.

Learning with YouTube

Steve Dotto has a series of videos on setting up a Google Account. He starts with setting up a free Gmail account. The first video is called Google Account – Google Basics – Part 1.

Here’s a video by Steve Dotto called How to Take Control of Your Google Account, Google Privacy Settings and More.

G Suite

As part of G Suite, Gmail comes with additional features designed for business use, including

• Email addresses with the customer’s domain name (johnny@yourcompany.com)
• 99.9% guaranteed uptime with zero scheduled downtime for maintenance
• Either 30GB or unlimited storage shared with Google Drive, depending on the plan
• 24/7 phone and email support
• Synchronization compatibility with Microsoft Outlook and other email providers
• Support for add-ons that integrate third-party apps purchased from the G Suite Marketplace with Gmail

To create a new account, go to Google.com and click the blue Sign In button in the upper right part of the browser. Click Create an account at the bottom of the next page. Enter your first and last name, the email name you want, a password. Entering your mobile phone number and alternate email address is optional, but recommended.Prove you are not a robot and enter your country.

When you set up an account you can also setting up a Google+ profile, but you don’t have to. With Google+ you can add a small photo if you wish. Google+ is a social network or perhaps better describes as a social layer across all of Google’s services.

Google account settings has the following sections: Sign-in & security, Personal info and privacy, account preferences, Security checkup, Privacy checkup.

You can link a Google account to your Chrome browser, to get more options. You do this by signing in to Chrome on your own personal computer/laptop. Why do this? If you go to your Gmail account and already be logged in. This works for YouTube also. The second reason is synchronization. So if you bookmark a web page on your Android phone you can see that bookmark in your web browse as long as you’ve signed into your Google account on each of those machines.

In Chrome on your computer, go to Setting from the menu in the top right corner of the browser. The menu will have three dots or three bars. Now we are looking at Chrome settings and we know this because the URL in the browser is chrome://settings/ You can synch everything or click the drop down button at the top to choose what to synch and de-select some of the check marks.

The Chrome browser has a password manager. As a warning, it is easy for someone to get access to your passwords that have been saved in Chrome’s password manager if they ever get a chance to sit down to your computer when it is not locked with a password. When you log into a site, such as Facebook, Chrome may ask you “Do you want Google Chrome to remember your password for this site?” The options are “Never for this site” or “Save password”. It is recommended to always choose “Never for this site”. Back to the synch options, it is recommended to uncheck “passwords”.