– The 10 Best Productivity Apps of

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Calendar apps and to-do apps, for example, will keep you on task. Utilities like a clipboard tool take some of the hassle out of working on your computer all day. And automation tools make your PC do more work for you in the background. Here are the 20 Windows productivity apps and software we think everyone should have—or at least try.

Whatever your role, they’ll save you time and effort. Let’s get to boosting your PC productivity! For this roundup, we focused on categories of apps that would help most people work faster and more efficiently, rather than tools someone might use primarily to do their work. We looked at the most popular options in various productivity categories and tested them for both ease of use and how well they worked on Windows 10 whether traditional desktop software or apps from the Windows App Store.

The majority of programs on this list are free or at least ones we’d invest in ourselves. Note: we didn’t include built-in Windows programs, like OneDrive or Snipping Tool, since you already have them. Customize your desktop the way you prefer to work, enhance Windows with simple tweaks, and teach your computer to play nicely with other devices.

This section of our roundup contains the most recommendations, because, often, the easiest way to work more productively is to fix the annoyances you face daily. Quickly preview files of different types, like Quick Look on macOS.

MacOS has one awesome feature that’s sorely missing in Windows: Quick Look, which lets you peek at the contents of photos, PDFs, other file types, and folders without opening them. All you have to do is press the Spacebar. That means you can instantly grab copy from a text file, watch a video, and more without waiting for it to load in another program. Windows doesn’t come with this feature by default, but, thankfully, Seer fills that void.

It works like the Mac version but has more options. You can customize settings like which key triggers the preview or add plugins to support additional file types.

Note that in our tests, some of the plugins didn’t work, including the Microsoft Office plugin. The core program still supports hundreds of common file types, though. Seer works for Windows Vista and newer, but if you want a more modern alternative, check out QuickLook also free. It’s not as customizable as Seer, but it is fast and fits in seamlessly with Windows 10’s sleek window design.

Automatically adjust the color of your computer so you sleep better and reduce eyestrain. A growing body of research shows that blue light–the kind thrown off by our screens–interrupts the quality of our sleep.

If you tend to work into the evenings or late at night on your computer, this is an issue that can affect your productivity the next day and your overall health. Enter your location and the kind of lighting in your workspace, and the small utility will automatically adjust the color of your monitor to the time of day. Your screen will be bright during the day and take on a warm, dimmer light when the sun sets. You can also adjust the color settings for different scenarios, such as “reduce eyestrain” tints your display both day and night or “color fidelity” smaller adjustments, for more color accuracy.

One of my favorite, less talked about features of the app: It will gently nudge you to stop working when you’re waking up in, say, six hours.

Manage multiple monitors precisely. Having more than one monitor saves you the time and hassle of switching back and forth between your open windows. However, Windows’ display settings don’t let you do much beyond choosing whether to mirror your primary display or extend the desktop to all screens. DisplayFusion is the most feature-rich multi-monitor utility for Windows. Create profiles for window sizes and positions to organize your windows just the way you like every time you start your computer.

Use screensavers and set your desktop wallpaper to span all your displays. Add a taskbar to each of your monitors. Build custom scripts to automate your windows management. You’d be hard pressed to find what you can’t customize in your multi-monitor setup with DisplayFusion. That power comes with a learning curve, but it’s worth the effort if you want to get the most out of your screens.

Note: Most of the advanced and most popular uses for DisplayFusion require a license. The small utility offers essential controls like moving windows to another monitor and saving each monitor’s configuration, such as screen resolution and monitor position.

Organize windows to maximize your screen real estate. If you often work with several windows open at once, AquaSnap can keep them organized for you in, well, a snap. You can quickly align one window with another by dragging it in place, stretch a window to the edge of your screen in one direction with a double-click, make one window always stay on top, and even move windows together in groups. It works for multiple monitors, too pro version required.

Combine program windows into browser-like tabs. Hover over the window’s title bar and drag the tab to the window you want to group it with. It even works if you want to combine windows from different programs into a tabbed group.

This way, you can save screen real estate and avoid visual clutter, which means more focus on the task at hand. Groupy is an alternative to TidyTabs that fits in more seamlessly with Windows 10’s design and adds features like a plus sign in the tabs bar to quickly add a new tab to a window.

TeamViewer: Remote Control Free. DocuSign Free. Evernote Free. Free Screen Recorder Free. Web VPN Free. Zalo Desktop Free. Cortana Free. Mail Free. QuickLook Free. Move Mouse Free. Journal, a Microsoft Garage project Free. Bluetooth for Windows 10 Free. Access Bluetooth settings directly from your home screen. WhatsApp for Windows 10 Free. Send and receive instant messages, photos and other media from your contacts for free.

Viber for Windows Free. Send free messages as well as make free calls to other Viber users, on any device and network. Snood For Windows Free to try. Test your intellect by freeing all the trapped snoods with other snoods at them. Windows Media Player Free. Get fast and flexible digital-media playback with access to smart organization features and online stores.

Xender for Windows 10 Free. Me and my girlfriend installed this today and fell in love immediately. It really helps that we also recently put up a small Jira server for us two to organize our daily lives, so your program was perfect for us.

Thank you so much for your hard work! We also love the pomodoro integration and your “Help I’m procrastinating!

We will recommend it to all our tech friends! Be more productive with Super Productivity.

 
 

 

Best productivity tools of | TechRadar.

 

Many of us need specific tools to get our jobs done. But beyond specialized software, there’s a vast ocean of Windows apps that can help almost anyone be more productive at work. Calendar apps and to-do apps, for example, will keep you on task. Utilities like a clipboard tool take some of the hassle out of working on your computer all day.

And automation tools make your PC do more work for you in the background. Here are the 20 Windows productivity apps and software we think everyone should have—or at least try. Whatever your role, they’ll save you time and effort. Let’s get to boosting your PC productivity! For this roundup, we focused on categories of apps that would help most people work faster and more efficiently, rather than tools someone might use primarily to do their work.

We looked at the most popular options in various productivity categories and tested them for both ease of use and how well they worked on Windows 10 whether traditional desktop software or apps from the Windows App Store.

The majority of programs on this list are free or at least ones we’d invest in ourselves. Note: we didn’t include built-in Windows programs, like OneDrive or Snipping Tool, since you already have them. Customize your desktop the way you prefer to work, enhance Windows with simple tweaks, and teach your computer to play nicely with other devices. This section of our roundup contains the most recommendations, because, often, the easiest way to work more productively is to fix the annoyances you face daily.

Quickly preview files of different types, like Quick Look on macOS. MacOS has one awesome feature that’s sorely missing in Windows: Quick Look, which lets you peek at the contents of photos, PDFs, other file types, and folders without opening them. All you have to do is press the Spacebar. That means you can instantly grab copy from a text file, watch a video, and more without waiting for it to load in another program. Windows doesn’t come with this feature by default, but, thankfully, Seer fills that void.

It works like the Mac version but has more options. You can customize settings like which key triggers the preview or add plugins to support additional file types. Note that in our tests, some of the plugins didn’t work, including the Microsoft Office plugin.

The core program still supports hundreds of common file types, though. Seer works for Windows Vista and newer, but if you want a more modern alternative, check out QuickLook also free. It’s not as customizable as Seer, but it is fast and fits in seamlessly with Windows 10’s sleek window design.

Automatically adjust the color of your computer so you sleep better and reduce eyestrain. A growing body of research shows that blue light–the kind thrown off by our screens–interrupts the quality of our sleep. If you tend to work into the evenings or late at night on your computer, this is an issue that can affect your productivity the next day and your overall health. Enter your location and the kind of lighting in your workspace, and the small utility will automatically adjust the color of your monitor to the time of day.

Your screen will be bright during the day and take on a warm, dimmer light when the sun sets. You can also adjust the color settings for different scenarios, such as “reduce eyestrain” tints your display both day and night or “color fidelity” smaller adjustments, for more color accuracy. One of my favorite, less talked about features of the app: It will gently nudge you to stop working when you’re waking up in, say, six hours. Manage multiple monitors precisely.

Having more than one monitor saves you the time and hassle of switching back and forth between your open windows. However, Windows’ display settings don’t let you do much beyond choosing whether to mirror your primary display or extend the desktop to all screens.

DisplayFusion is the most feature-rich multi-monitor utility for Windows. Create profiles for window sizes and positions to organize your windows just the way you like every time you start your computer. Use screensavers and set your desktop wallpaper to span all your displays. Add a taskbar to each of your monitors. Build custom scripts to automate your windows management.

You’d be hard pressed to find what you can’t customize in your multi-monitor setup with DisplayFusion. That power comes with a learning curve, but it’s worth the effort if you want to get the most out of your screens. Note: Most of the advanced and most popular uses for DisplayFusion require a license.

The small utility offers essential controls like moving windows to another monitor and saving each monitor’s configuration, such as screen resolution and monitor position. Organize windows to maximize your screen real estate. If you often work with several windows open at once, AquaSnap can keep them organized for you in, well, a snap.

You can quickly align one window with another by dragging it in place, stretch a window to the edge of your screen in one direction with a double-click, make one window always stay on top, and even move windows together in groups. It works for multiple monitors, too pro version required. Combine program windows into browser-like tabs. Hover over the window’s title bar and drag the tab to the window you want to group it with. It even works if you want to combine windows from different programs into a tabbed group.

This way, you can save screen real estate and avoid visual clutter, which means more focus on the task at hand. Groupy is an alternative to TidyTabs that fits in more seamlessly with Windows 10’s design and adds features like a plus sign in the tabs bar to quickly add a new tab to a window. Launch your favorite programs, files, and more from anywhere on your computer.

Shortcuts make the productivity world go round. Quick Access Popup, as the name implies, gives you easy access to items on your computer or on the web in a popup menu. Click your middle mouse button anywhere to bring up the menu. You can customize Quick Access Popup to add your favorite folders, files, programs, links, text snippets, and more.

It’s like the ever-useful right-click context menu in Explorer, but one you curate and can use everywhere. Get to your destination more quickly than the standard pecking and searching on your computer. Quick Access Popup Price: Free. Send texts, files, and links to and from all your devices. You get a text message from a friend, but your phone is in another room or buried in your bag.

You find a great new place to eat, but don’t want to email yourself the link to access it on the go. You’re away from your desk and need a file on your computer that wasn’t synced to your phone or tablet.

If any of these situations sound familiar to you, go download Pushbullet. Available on every platform and also as a Chrome extension, Pushbullet simply connects all your devices so you can share files and get notifications no matter where you are.

The standalone Windows app gives you the new Remote Files access feature and you can pin it to your taskbar for easy access. Access your computer remotely. TeamViewer is one of the best remote access software options for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s free for personal use.

Once you have TeamViewer installed on a computer, you can connect to and control it from anywhere in the world using another computer or your mobile device.

Log into your parents’ PC, for example, to troubleshoot their technical problems. Or share your desktop with others to walk them through a demo. Or connect to your home computer when you’re on the road to retrieve a file. Or even, if you’re lazy like me, run a program on another computer in another room in your house without leaving your desk. TeamViewer combines remote access with online meeting and screen-sharing tools. Note that if you use TeamViewer for work, you’ll need a license.

Or for a completely free option, there’s Chrome Remote Desktop , which, as the name implies, is for Chrome, rather than a desktop program. Getting things out of your head and onto paper or digital paper is one of the best ways to preserve your mental bandwidth. The software below will help you do that. Take detailed, intuitively organized notes that capture images, audio, text, and more.

OneNote is one of the most versatile and feature-rich note-taking apps around. The interface mimics real-world notebooks or binders, so you can have separate notebooks for your personal and work projects or create notebooks for different clients or class subjects.

Within each notebook, you can organize your notes intuitively in colorful tabbed sections and group notes together in a stack. Beyond the organization features, OneNote offers many ways to make your notes come alive: Inking tools let you create handwritten or drawn notes; tags can be added to any part of the page; and text, tables, and images can be placed anywhere on the page for a truly flexible note-taking approach. It’s like writing on paper, but with search, tagging, and other smart digital features built in.

OneNote is part of Microsoft Office , but the desktop version will no longer be supported by Microsoft starting in It is, however, also available as a free Windows 10 app, with matching Mac, mobile, and web apps. If you have a Windows PC or tablet that supports stylus input, OneNote should be your go-to note-taking app. If you create a large number of notes or clip a ton of web pages for reference, Evernote is a good alternative, since this note-taking app offers a robust search feature–one that even integrates with your Google searches, so you can search the web and your notes at the same time.

Jot down anything quickly for easy reference. Throughout the day, you’ll often come across information you need to jot down–a phone number, an offer code, your takeout order details–that you don’t want to clutter up your more important notebooks with.

That’s where Sticky Notes come in. Microsoft’s Windows 10 app saves trees and a trip to the office supply store while adding intelligent features like Cortana Reminders for notes that have a date and time or maps for addresses you add to a note. It also supports handwriting and typing.

It’s the digital scratchpad that’s both smart and simple to use. Microsoft Sticky Notes Price: Free. Edit text intelligently. It’s the free, souped-up alternative to Notepad, with a lot of tricks up its sleeves.