Productivity on Alemasone

Best Free and Paid Microsoft Office Alternatives

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 19:55:02 +0000

When choosing an alternative to Office, the most important factor is who you are sharing documents with. If you write for yourself or within a group that all uses the same software, LibreOffice and other free suites are more than enough. However, if you receive and send complex .docx files every day to people using Word, layout discrepancies become a constant nuisance.

Before installing anything, remember that Microsoft offers web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for free: they are used via your browser with a free Microsoft account; they have fewer features than the installed apps but open and save files without any compatibility issues. If you only open a document occasionally, this will likely suffice.

The Best Telegram Bots to Use Every Single Day

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 10:13:30 +0000

A Telegram bot is an account managed by a program: you message it and it does something, whether it’s reminding you of an appointment, alerting you when flight prices drop, or keeping spam out of a group. Before you start, there’s one thing you should know: the bot reads what you send it, and in groups, if it has the right permissions, it can also read messages from others.

To use one, search for its username (the one starting with @) in the search bar, open the chat, and press Start. Below, you’ll find the ones that still work, starting with official Telegram bots, which are the most reliable because they don’t share your data with anyone else.

Must-Have VS Code Extensions You Should Install Now

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 21:57:04 +0000

Having thirty extensions installed is a problem, not a configuration. Each one slows down startup, consumes memory, and can conflict with others. The ones you actually need can be counted on the fingers of two hands, and many things that required an extension years ago are now built directly into Visual Studio Code.

Before adding anything, look at what the editor already does: format on save, renaming symbols across the entire project, Git, terminal, find and replace with regular expressions, multiple cursors, Markdown preview, settings sync, JavaScript debugging in the browser, and bracket pair colorization. For those last three, until a few years ago, you needed Settings Sync, Debugger for Chrome, and Bracket Pair Colorizer: if you still have them, you can remove them.

Best iPad Note-Taking Apps for Apple Pencil

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:30:54 +0000

If you write by hand and then need to find what you’ve written, there is one feature that matters most: handwriting search. GoodNotes and Notability do this well, but so does Apple Notes, which is free and already installed. Before buying anything, try using the built-in one for a week: you’ll immediately understand if it meets your needs or what you’re missing.

All of them know how to write well on the screen. The differences emerge later: when your notes turn into hundreds and you need to organize them, when you are annotating 300-page PDFs, or when you need to convert handwriting into text to send to someone.

Best AI Tools to Use: A Complete Comparison

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 15:04:00 +0000

For most people, the free version of one of the major assistants is enough. A subscription, which costs around 20 euros per month for all services, makes sense if you use the tool every day and hit usage limits, or if you need specific features like analyzing long documents or generating images and video.

The assistants are more similar than advertising suggests: they answer questions, write text, summarize documents, and help with coding. The differences lie in the details (how much information they can keep in mind, how reliable they are when citing sources, and where they are integrated), and that is how you choose.

Notion vs Trello: Which One Should You Choose?

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 17:19:01 +0000

Notion and Trello only overlap to some extent. Trello is a Kanban board: columns and cards—you’ll get it in a minute. Notion is a workspace where you build documents, databases, and tasks, including Kanban. If you need to launch a workflow by tonight, go with Trello; if you need to keep information, notes, and projects together, go with Notion.

There is no single “which one is better” answer, but there are precise answers depending on what you need to organize. Let’s see where each one wins, how much they cost, and how they perform as your team grows.

Best Trello Alternatives to Organize Your Projects

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 18:36:07 +0000

Trello’s free plan includes up to ten boards per workspace, ten collaborators, and 250 Butler automation runs per month. As long as that meets your needs, it’s hard to find anything better. When things start getting tight, you have to choose between paying $5 per user per month or switching to another tool.

Alternatives cater to different needs. Some people just want another Kanban board; others prefer keeping notes and tasks in the same place; some need Gantt charts and workload views, while others want their data to stay on their own server. Let’s start with a quick review of how Trello works, then go through the alternatives one by one, and finally offer some guidance on how to choose based on your specific case.

12 Hidden macOS Features to Boost Your Mac Productivity

Thu, 08 Feb 2024 19:28:20 +0000

macOS is full of features you won’t see until you look for them: no messages announce them and no icons suggest them. Most are tucked away in System Settings, in panels that many people only open to change their wallpaper. I have gathered the most useful ones, from Hot Corners to automations with Automator and Shortcuts.

We start with those you use every day and move up to automations, which save you from repeating the same sequence of clicks twenty times. These tips apply to macOS 26 Tahoe, the current version; on previous versions, almost everything works the same way—only a few menu names might differ.

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows 11

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 14:20:51 +0000

PowerToys is a free and open-source collection of utilities that Microsoft develops for Windows 11 and Windows 10. It can be installed in a minute from the Microsoft Store, GitHub, or via winget, and each tool can be turned on or off individually in the settings.

The name has been around since the days of Windows 95, but today’s PowerToys has little to do with that package: it is an open project, updated every few weeks, which now features more than thirty different tools. At the time of writing, the latest stable version is 0.101 (build 0.101.2362.0), released on August 25, 2026: it introduced Window Hopper, Stable and Insider update channels, and the compact mode for the Command Palette, which has become the access point for almost everything else in the suite.