Five apps to improve your productivity

We live in a modern digital age where we all use a combination of computers, tablets and smartphones. Most of the time, there is no formal tuition or education provided, but sometimes you stumble on clever tricks that can improve your productivity and user experience. Here are some of my favourite apps.

Poster My Wall

If you want to produce promotional material for your medical practice or to support a personal cause, such as a charity event then Poster My Wall is one for you. The end product can be paper based or used on social media.

The free version is probably acceptable to the occasional user, but there are some reasonable paid for options for regular users. You can utilise very basic artistic and technical skills by choosing from the large volume of templates available so a customised professional poster can be produced within minutes. Apart from saving you a lot of time and effort, it can be very pleasing to produce such a good result with little effort.

Snipping App

In Windows PC machines there is the snipping app, which can take a snapshot to copy words or images from all or part of your PC screen. This is easily accessed using a keyboard shortcut and the screenshot can then be shared with other people.

In recent incarnations of Windows, Microsoft have added a video recording button, but you have to launch the app to use this and click on the video button. You can record any predefined area of the screen and the file is saved as a commonly used format, MP4. This is useful if you want to record online lectures, movies, video calls, and more.

Cozycozy

If you are looking for somewhere to stay on holiday then there are a lot of websites and apps to search, but this can be laborious and you can miss out on the ideal place. So, step forward this impressive search engine. You enter the details of your holiday (or business stay) into the simple form then press search. Cozycozy quickly checks out a large number of other booking platforms and serves you up the results it thinks you are looking for.

The results are quickly assembled and can be looked at as a list or a map.  I recently found my ideal place to stay for a forthcoming trip by using this offering. I found it easy and it saved time searching on multiple websites.

Send documents to your Kindle device

Many of us have a Kindle device that we use to read books. But what many people have not realised is that documents such as word files or PDF files can be added to the Kindle app or device. There are a series of steps to follow that only take a few minutes to achieve. It can be a useful repository to store important documents and compatible and appropriate eBooks.

There has been a recent innovation that can make it even easier to add word documents to the Kindle ecosystem. If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. Amazon recently introduced the new ‘Send to Kindle from Microsoft Word‘ feature which enables users to send documents to Kindle right from within the Microsoft Word app itself.

Generate QR Codes

I have previously written about QR Codes in this blog series and mentioned it is easy to obtain a QR code from a web browser. In Google Chrome it can be done by right clicking on the web page (on a PC desktop) and you can chose to generate a QR code from the menu.

Although QR Codes are useful beware of QR codes taking you to potentially malicious sites, so don’t blindly trust them. Equally be aware of QR Code Jacking as scammers have found ways that QR codes can be used to trick victims into sharing personal information and bank details.