Great home office hacks

If you don’t have the cash to buy the standard office digital tools, don’t worry. These office hacks can make you look professional without the expense.

These products are free to use, although you can usually buy better functions on top. Many are web-based so you don’t even need to download anything. All you need is an internet connection.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets

Microsoft’s terms of license mean you may not even have a copy of Word or Excel on your home machine at all. There are three alternatives to cloud or not to cloud. Or both.

Google Docs has become indispensible. You need to have a Google/Gmail account first. If you don’t, then you probably should just to take advantage.

Google Docs is a tremendously convenient way to create and share documents, and collaborate in real-time with people at the other end of the world on on the computer next to yours too, something Word can’t even manage.

Work is stored in the cloud, but there are offline options too. With Wi-fi so readily available there are fewer and fewer situations where Google Docs cannot work.

Google Docs has a second advantage over Word by saving your work as you type. Word always had the knack of crashing to lose your most recent work just before you clicked ‘save’, a situation everyone has experienced.

Google Docs falls down when you have to do much more than simple word processing. If you need to achieve more complex formatting on the page, then some more heavyweight alternatives are available.

Libre Office and Open Office both came from the same original initiative, and both do a good job of creating and managing your documents. Open Office seems a little more old-fashioned but try both to see which works best for you.

Kingsoft Office is a Chinese venutre that looks and feels remarkably like  older versions of Word, so absolutely familiar to many users.

All four of these products are free and include spreadsheets and presentation software, compatible with the Microsoft versions.

Another handy tool is a pdf converter, to allow you to strip words out of pdf documents. Several web-based products are on the market and all do much the same thing – you can download text immediately or have it delivered to your email. Try freepdfconvert to start.

Picture editing

If word processing is beyond your reach, then picture editing certainly will be. For most editorial work simple picture editing is all that is needed.

If you use a web-based Content Management System, they normally include picture editing capabilities, although usually rather unreliable.

For simple edits try picmonkey to crop your pictures and add some effects too. It’s all web based, but won’t take very large files or the .tif format.

If you find you have to deal with the .tif format, again don’t worry because you can convert .tif files to .jpg versions easily at zamzar.com, which can also convert .eps and .pdf files to .jpg.

Style

Another handy Google feature is hosting books that have fallen out of copywrite. Fowler’s famous first edition of Modern English Usage has been digitised.

For a more modern audience there is always the  Buzzfeed style guide and its British addendum, or The Guardian’s expansive style guide.

There is even an online Thesaurus if you just can’t find the right word.

Social Media

There are really only two products out there now that allow you to manage social media for free, as favourites like Hootsuite discontinued their free service.

Buffer allows you to post to your various social networks in advance. You set the times you want to post, write the updates and Buffer handles the rest. The free version handles only a fixed amount of content at a time but you can upgrade.

Tweetdeck lets you handle multiple Twitter accounts at the same time and schedule tweets, but also react in real-time. The feed is much easier to read and use than from your Twitter page, just be careful to double-check which account you are posting from.

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