It’s that time of year again: Time to decorate the house, prepare for merry-making, and find the perfect gift for everyone on your list. This year, our holiday gift-giving guide focuses on gifts for you. Give yourself a little treat to reduce life’s stress. Check out our four favorite online subscription apps to make your work life more productive and less stressful.
- SmartDraw: If you have ever searched for fresh infographics to illustrate a list, concept, process, or statistics in a presentation or book, this is the site for you. SmartDraw offers hundreds of easy-to-use, customizable templates and graphics. You create them online and download them as .PNG files that you can easily insert into diagrams. You can also share access to the editable versions online with others on your team so they can edit the images as needed.
- NounProject: Need icons or images to represent a concept? NounProject has over 2 million curated icons that you can download and use. For a minimal annual subscription fee, you can download as many images as you like and use them without copyright fears in personal, professional, or commercial materials. You can download them in a variety of sizes, colors, and backgrounds (including transparent). This makes creating professional looking slides much easier.
- SmartSheet: If you own a Mac and are a project manager, you have probably realized that MS Project does not work on your computer. Luckily, there’s a more user-friendly project planning software available online. Smartsheet stores your project plans online and allows you to view them in Grid, Gantt, Calendar, and even Card view. Card view looks like little pieces of sticky paper that can be arranged in columns either by resource name or by completion status. You can download the plan to Excel, PDF, or even Google Sheets, but you really do not need to do so. You can share the file link with stakeholders and they can look at it online. You can even control whether they can edit or just view the document.
- Filemail: Need to send files that are too big for email, but you do not have a shared DropBox or OneDrive account? This file transfer site is user-friendly and allows you to send more information than most other file transfer sites. The free version allows you to send up to 10 files of any size. After that, you have to pay. The subscription version allows you to send an unlimited number of files of any size. You can choose how long the files remain on the system, up to “permanently”. You get 100 GB of storage included with your subscription. Best thing is that you can either send the files as an email or as a link that you can then copy into your own emails.
Have any other favorites you would like to share? Post your suggestions in the Comments section.
Happy Holidays!