It is time once again for my newish monthly roundup of the apps, tool and tips that I’ve uncovered over the course of the past month to help you #WorkSmarter and more efficiently. 

These come from my daily “L&D Toolbox” newsletter which you can find and subscribe to here for free. Sign up for that one and you’ll get 5 new tools every weekday. (Unless I forget a day-which makes it “almost” every week day.)

Here is the collection of everything from February. If you have any new discoveries that you’re really loving, please send them my way! 

Spotlight Apps

These are the ones I’m most excited about and have been putting to use myself. 

Murf – A text-based voice over maker with hyper realistic AI voices and very reasonable pricing.

Power Automate  – Easily create automated workflows with Microsoft Power Automate, previously Microsoft Flow, to improve productivity with business process automation

MeetButter – MeetButter is an all-in-one platform built with all the tools you need to host

interactive workshops, training sessions and live courses.

Mixily – Mixily helps you create and manage events. Design beautiful landing pages in under a minute, with features for power hosts: create a Zoom call, schedule your invitations and messages, poll your guests for a date, and even sell tickets all on one page.

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And here is the rest of this month’s collection:

Design & Multimedia

Muzli Design Inspiration – Designers’ Secret Source: all the design inspiration you need in your Chrome new tab. 

Murf – A text-based voice over maker with hyper realistic AI voices

Multistream to 30+ Platforms Simultaneously | Restream Restream is the best way to live stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and 30+ streaming sites at once. 

Apps & Tools

ColorZilla – Eyedropper, Color Picker, Gradient Generator and more Advanced Eyedropper, Color Picker, Gradient Generator and more

Penpot – Design Freedom for Teams — A free open-source solution for design and prototyping.

Window Resizer – Exactly what the title says. Resizes your browser window to specific sizes.

Lorem Ipsum –  Quickly generate Lorem Ipsum placeholder text. Select a desired length and choose between paragraphs, words, bytes or lists. Toggle between HTML and rich text.

jitter • Motion design, made simple A simple animation tool on the web. Animate your designs easily. Export your creations as videos or GIFs. All in your browser.

darktable – the photo workflow software darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable light table and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

Infographics Tools

Create Presentations, Infographics & Graphic Design | Visme –  Visme is the #1 online design software for non-designers. Create presentations that match your brand, interactive infographics and beautiful graphic design.

Genially, the tool for bringing your content to life – The tool for creating interactive content that makes your audience fall in love. Communicate, educate, and attract by bringing your content to life.

Make Infographics That People Love – Join over 1 million people creating their own professional graphics with our easy to use infographic maker. Sign up for free and choose from 1000+ infographic templates.

Create Infographics, Presentations & Reports | Piktochart – Create beautiful infographics, reports, posters, presentations and flyers easily with absolutely no design experience. Try Piktochart for free!

easel.ly | create and share visual ideas using infographics – Easel.ly is a simple web tool that empowers anyone to create and share powerful visuals (infographics, posters)… no design experience needed! We provide the canvas, you provide the creativity.

Image Editors

Affinity Photo – Professional Image Editing Software– The only fully loaded photo editor integrated across Mac, Windows and iOS, Affinity Photo is the first choice of thousands of professionals around the world.

Photopea: advanced photo editor – Photopea Online Photo Editor lets you edit photos, apply effects, filters, add text, crop or resize pictures. Do Online Photo Editing in your browser for free!

GIMP – GNU Image Manipulation Program – Free and open source image editing tool

Paint.NET – Free Software for Digital Photo Editing  – Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows.

Pixelmator Pro  – Professional image editing tools that anyone can use.

Resources

Iconduck – Free open source icons, illustrations and graphics  – Iconduck lists over 100,000 free open source icons, illustrations and graphics. They can be used for personal and commercial projects.

Fonts Ninja | Supercharge your font workflow  – Speed up your design process! Try fonts discovered on websites directly in any design software

Build powerful websites, web apps and client portals on Airtable, in 10 minutes.  – Softr turns your Airtable data into beautiful and powerful website, web app or client portal. Pick a template or start from the scratch.

The website and landing page platform for SaaS | Unstack Inc.  – Build high performance websites, blogs, and landing pages that integrate with your existing marketing stack to drive traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

Screenshot Tools

Screenstab –Screenshots that stand out 

Awesome Screenshot –  Awesome Screenshot is the highest-rated screen capture & screen recorder tool with over 2 million users! Screen sharing, fast and easy! Share screen with video and screenshot.

Nimbus Capture – Capture screenshots and record video & screencasts – Use Nimbus Capture to make screencasts of your entire desktop or browser tabs, or create videos using your webcam. Take screenshots to capture full web pages—or just part of a page.

Lightshot — screenshot tool for Mac & Win 

GoFullPage – Full Page Screen Capture Chrome Extension The simplest and most reliable Chrome extension for taking a screenshot of an entire webpage. In one click screenshot a full page. Optionally crop, edit, and annotate your result in a modern interface. Export to image, PDF, or copy to your clipboard so you can share it with others or keep it in your own records.

How to take a screenshot in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge.

Background Sounds to Increase 

myNoise ®  – Background Noises • Ambient Sounds • Interactive Soundscapes • Relaxing Music • Online & Free

Noisli  – Your digital place for focus. Mix different sounds and create your perfect sound environment to work, study and relax.

A Soft Murmur – Ambient sounds to wash away distraction

Noises Online  – Premium Ambient Noises & Relaxing Sounds • NEW Audio file download • Online & Free • Increase your focus • Boost your productivity • Quieten your mind • Mask your tinnitus •

Coffitivity  – Coffitivity recreates the ambient sounds of a cafe to boost your creativity and help you work better. Proven and peer reviewed, see the research to learn more.

General & Miscellaneous

Kumo | Relationship Maps – Kumu makes it easy to organize complex data into relationship maps that are beautiful to look at and a pleasure to use.

Discord | Your Place to Talk and Hang Out Discord is the easiest way to talk over voice, video, and text. Talk, chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.

Homeurls – Online Bookmarks Manager– A simple, customizable start page option.

Feedbro – RSS Feed Reader with built-in Rule Engine –  Save time! Read and follow news, blogs, feeds and social media with Feedbro. Automate filtering with built-in rule engine! Read RSS, Atom and RDF feeds and content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, VK, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Bitchute, Vimeo, Flickr, Pinterest, Google+ and SlideShare.

Custom Cursor  – Custom Cursor is a browser extension that lets you change your cursor to a custom one from our giant cursor collection to choose from or upload your own cursors

Qlearly – Modern Bookmarks and tabs manager  – Organize your favorite websites by columns and boards. Every time you open a new tab, your board will load within a second. Try it for free. 🚀

Gmail

Introducing Zapier’s new Gmail add-on – Updates | Zapier– Today we’re excited to introduce a new way to automate your work: the Zapier Gmail add-on. This add-on makes it easy to move high-value emails into your other apps with just a click, without ever leaving Gmail. You can use the add-on to create customized one-click workflows that give you …

Dropbox for Gmail – Google Workspace Marketplace – View attachments, save to Dropbox, and share from Dropbox—all without leaving Gmail.

Box for Google Workspace Add-on – –  Seamlessly copy your Google files over to Box, attach files to emails from Box, and download email attachments to Box

Trello for Gmail – Quickly create new cards on your Trello boards without leaving your inbox.

Zoom for Gmail –  Meet happy with flawless video, clear audio, and easy content sharing directly from Zoom for Gmail!

Email & Newsletters

All Your Email Accounts and Web Apps in One Focused Place – Wavebox Browser– All your email accounts and web apps in one focused place. Transform how you work online with the Wavebox browser for work.

All-in-One Collaboration. Remote Team Workspace. | Taskade – Taskade is the all-in-one collaboration platform for remote teams. Unleash your team productivity with task lists, mindmaps, and video chat. Create the perfect workflow for your team. 500+ Templates.

Kill the Newsletter! – Convert email newsletters into Atom feeds.

Doit.io – Keep everything organized in one place 

Unlayer– Unlayer is an email editor and page builder to build beautiful, responsive designs quickly and easily. Use it online or embed it into your application.

Webform & Survey Tools

Typeform  Build beautiful, interactive forms — get more responses. No coding needed. Templates for quizzes, research, feedback, lead generation, and more.

Surve Monkey –Use SurveyMonkey to drive your business forward by using our free online survey tool to capture the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to you.

Google Forms: Free Online Surveys for Personal Use Create a new survey and edit it with others at the same time. Choose from a variety of pre-made themes or create your own. Free with a Google account.

Make Beautiful Surveys, Forms, and Polls Free | SurveyLegend Create custom, interactive surveys, forms, questionnaires, and polls on any device with SurveyLegend’s free, dynamic software tool.

Enterprise Online Survey Software & Tools for Businesses | SoGoSurvey SoGoSurvey offers an advanced data management platform and enterprise online survey software for large organizations and businesses. Request a demo to get started today!

Task Tracking & To Dos

Welcome to Microsoft To Do Microsoft To Do

Sorted³ – Hyper-schedule your entire day in one place Sorted³ combines your tasks, calendar events and notes into a unified timeline so you can hyper-schedule your entire day in one place.

TeuxDeux / What deux yeux have teux deux teuxday? An easy way to organize so you can focus on what matters.

Community Platforms

tribe.so – Build fully customizable online community powered by modern social features, widgets, and native app store. Seamlessly add social elements to your product.

Mighty Networks –  Here’s how to create a community platform that makes it easy to connect your members. Hint: there’s no need to build it from scratch.

Yammer: Work Smarter, Work Together Work Smarter, Work Together Connect with people across your organization to make better decisions, faster.

Workplace by Facebook–  Where teams connect to get work done

SharePoint, Team Collaboration Software Tools Share, organize, and discover information with Microsoft SharePoint. Learn about SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Apps for SharePoint

Online Meeting Tools

Home – Vowel–  Vowel is a tool that captures your team’s meetings. Use it to annotate meetings in real-time, tag action items, call back ideas verbatim—and a whole lot more.

Zoom Apps drive your meeting workflow and engaging experiences – Zoom Apps bring best of breed applications into the Zoom experience for seamless productivity and engaging experiences.

Mmhmm –  A new way to communicate via video — both in real-time and asynchronously. Perfect for our new remote reality, add polish and creativity to every presentation.

Miro Tools for Online Meetings Boost your team online meetings with energy, creativity, and momentum. Use our video chat, pre-built templates, sticky notes, voting, timer, and more.

Dory | Make every meeting engaging and productive Dory provides Q&A, live audience interaction, and meeting notes all in one seamless experience.

Whiteboard & Collaboration Spaces

Miro: the collaborative whiteboard platform for distributed teams — miro.com Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams. Join 10M+ users from around the world

MURAL is a digital workspace for visual collaboration Our platform and professional services enable innovative teams to think and collaborate visually to solve important problems. Simply put what’s on your mind on sticky notes. Then organize in lists, flowcharts, diagrams, frameworks, methods and drawings to activate and align your team.

Microsoft Whiteboard The intelligent canvas for creative collaboration and teamwork that’s included with Microsoft 365

Stormboard Make your meetings, brainstorms, and projects better! Use our digital sticky notes, whiteboards, and workspace for business processes like Agile, Design Thinking, and more.

Conceptboard Conceptboard is an online visual collaboration platform for teams and enterprises. Discuss, present, and evolve your products and services.

Working with PDFs

PDF Candy – Edit PDF free with online PDF editor — pdfcandy.com Edit PDF files with PDF Candy – a free online PDF editor. Convert PDF to Word, PDF to JPG, merge PDF, split PDF, compress PDF, etc.

Every tool you need to work with PDFs in one place iLovePDF is an online service to work with PDF files completely free and easy to use. Merge PDF, split PDF, compress PDF, office to PDF, PDF to JPG and more!

Xodo – With Xodo, you can edit, annotate, sign, and share PDFs on desktop, mobile, and web. Xodo makes working with PDFs quick and easy, so you can get things done.

PDFescape– Free PDF Editor & Form Filler

FormSwift: Create Legal Documents – Select a template from our library of 500+ documents. Then fill out a step-by-step questionnaire and export your completed document in Word or PDF.

Quizzing & Surveys

Interact Quiz Maker: Create Your Own Quiz For Free — www.tryinteract.com Interact is a tool for creating online quizzes that generate leads, segment your audience, and drive traffic to your website.

Quizlet – Master any subject one success at a time

ProProfs: Create Quiz Online for Free –ProProfs is the world’s easiest online quiz maker software that offers customizable quizzes, templates & online assessments.

Quiz Maker | Make Amazing Online Quizzes in Minutes Make an amazing and fully customized online quiz in minutes, start for free. The webs easiest quiz maker. More than 15 milllion quizzes completed over 10 years

Create Free Online Surveys, Quizzes and Forms – FreeOnlineSurveys Create free online surveys, quizzes and forms with our easy to use drag and drop builder. Then collect and analyze your data with advanced reporting tools.

Microsoft Office

Power Automate  – Easily create automated workflows with Microsoft Power Automate, previously Microsoft Flow, to improve productivity with business process automation

Transcribe your recordings with Word The transcribe feature converts speech to a text transcript with each speaker individually separated.

Office 365 Stock Library  – Choose from thousands of royalty-free images, including stock images, icons, videos, cut-out characters, and stickers that you can insert in your Office files.

A new way to convert a Word document to PowerPoint or Sway  – Automatically convert a Word document into a PowerPoint deck or Sway

Create Animated GIFS with PowerPoint PowerPoint has long been capable of playing animated GIFs in slideshow mode, but now you can actually create animated GIFs with the program, further defining

Online Event Management & Support

Mixily — Mixily helps you create and manage events. Design beautiful landing pages in under a minute, with features for power hosts: create a Zoom call, schedule your invitations and messages, poll your guests for a date, and even sell tickets all on one page.

Luma – Where Creators Connect With Their Fans Luma helps creators interact with their fans. Build a website to host events, sell products, and run your newsletter, all in a few minutes.

Free Zoom Scheduler | Eventzilla Automate scheduling Zoom meetings for your attendees with our free Zoom Scheduler.

Eventbrite – Discover Great Events or Create Your Own & Sell Tickets Eventbrite brings people together through live experiences. Discover events that match your passions, or create your own with online ticketing tools.

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