5 Awesome Free Apps You Can Count On

steve dotto here how the heck you're doing this fine day and today on dottotech i'm going to share with you my five favorite free business tools that are available to us these are tools that are incredibly useful even in their free version now most of these tools are what we would call freemium tools where you get them for free you get a certain amount of functionality for free and then the manufacturer will charge you to get access to some more advanced features now many companies make the more advanced features really basic features so the free version is pretty much useless if you want to actually use it for business so my rule today is each one of these tools has to be very usable in the free form you might choose to upgrade at some point to the paid system but the free version has to be very robust and very usable so with that in mind let's dive in for my five free favorite tools i'm going to start with a mobile data collection tool from my friends at evernote now evernote unfortunately didn't make it on our list of my five favorite tools more on that in a few moments but evernote has a scanning utility unfortunately it's only available for ios it's called scannable this is one of the most useful free tools that you can get scannable will allow you to capture documents instantly and it does a great job of scanning them in they can be whiteboards they can be paper documents it will scan them in and it will convert them into pdf format combine them into longer pdf documents allow you to email them save them to evernote or do what you will with the documents we use it constantly for all sorts of legal purposes for just information gathering scannable as a free scanning utility on the smartphone is is is invaluable and it is completely free now it is ios only fortunately microsoft has a very good competitive product which is called microsoft lens which certainly you can use if you are in the microsoft ecosystem it's a terrific tool to choose as your main scanning app regardless if you're in windows or android but if you're in the android world you can look at microsoft lens as your main scanning app so the number one free tool and both of these tools are free all the time there is no freemium attachment is scannable on ios and microsoft lens on either ios or android the next tool has become invaluable to me it's canva canva is a graphics creation app which is completely free and the free version is incredibly robust you can do so very much with the free version canva is really a template-based graphics app ideally designed for creating all sorts of social media graphics for social sharing in twitter or in instagram or in facebook but you can also create short little videos with it you can use it to create slideshows and presentations you can use it to create posters and business cards you can use it to create ebooks you can lay out entire books in it and even you can lay out websites using canva it's just that rich but the thing that i like most about canva is they really don't limit you in any way between the free version and the paid version the paid version the assets and the paid version are things that make more efficient to use they don't stand in the way of you actually getting things done now i'm not going to spend time today demoing canva because we just did a really nice introduction to canva which you can click on here and watch the video i encourage you to do that definitely in the top five canva for graphics my second of my favorite free apps permit me to pontificate for just a moment many of you who have followed me for any period of time will say next up for steve is definitely going to be evernote because evernote is available for free and steve loves evernote so evernote must be on the list evernote didn't make the list why didn't evernote make the list for the reasons that i just talked about with canva canva allows you to create pretty much any graphic you want and they don't limit you in functionality using the free version you have to go through some extra hoops in order to get to the same place as with the paid version the paid version allows you to do things in a more streamlined method but it doesn't really add any extra functionality evernote has changed their free version so much and they've limited too many of the different aspects of using evernote and the biggest one that they've limited is the number of devices that you can install it on evernote's strength is using it on multiple platforms and being able to access the same data from our phone from our computer from the web and the fact that they limit it to just two devices means that really for evernote to be useful i've reached the point where i believe evernote needs to be paid for you need to use the paid version to really take advantage of it so that has disqualified it from our competition there you go the next of my five favorite tools is a tool that i've used for a very long time and it's been a big part of the success of my business and that is the project management tool asana now asana is so kind of central to how i do things here at dottotech that for a period of time i upgraded to the paid version because i thought i there would be features there that i needed and it turns out that i've downgraded because all of the free features were enough for me for managing my business so that i think really is a great testimonial to how robust the free version of asana is now asana is as i say a project management tool some people look at it as a task management tool but for project management we lay it out this way all of our different projects that we're working on here at dottotech we can see here as different as different projects so our webinar wednesdays are the youtube videos the one that i'm working on right now is right here each of these tools you weaken each of these uh projects we can open up and we have the ability to assign it to individuals to create subtasks and to share the tasks and to keep track of the progress of each one of our videos or each one of our projects as we're working our way through and you can see down here we've got all of the different published videos all of the videos that we've published recently they all started out as ideas here inside of canva they progressed into the production column and then they progressed into the published column as we added each of the different elements now again i'm not going to spend a lot of time going through all the features of asana we have an older video which is still actually really viable because the basic features in asana are still the same ones that we showed in that particular video but i'll encourage you to check that out if you're interested in a project management tool and there's one caveat on asana is asana is really gotten a lot of competition recently from several other applications most notably one called click up which is really starting to show its its strength now i'm not positive exactly which features in click up are free and which ones are paid so i can't really comment on how well it would perform as a straight up free service but it's certainly worth checking out i'll include some links to some creators who do a really great job of covering a saw of covering click up and if you are interested in comparing asana and looking for a free project management tool i encourage you to evaluate both of them but on my list asana is still there and i think it will be there for a very very long time the next tool that i'd like to share with you is a mind mapping tool it's called mind meister now there are a lot of mind mapping tools that are available on the market most of them start out as free services and there's other ones i like a lot but mindmeister is the one that i've been using lately we're actually using it in a project we're using it in a in a boot camp that we're doing right now for all of our different attendees of the boot camp to use and it has turned out to be a really terrific tool i am a big fan of mind mapping of laying out my thoughts and my ideas in a mind map and i actually use mind maps often in my presentations as the presentation tool instead of laying out instead of uh instead of slides and again i've got a video on how i use mind mapping for presentations which i'll share with you if you're interested in looking at it but mind meister the reason i like mindmeister as opposed to some of the other freemium available mind mapping tools is many of them are time limited whereas you have two weeks of free access before you have to start to pay and that doesn't land in the spirit of what i'm looking for as far as a tool that you can use for a long period of time as a free service whereas mindmeister does allow you to have three maps active at any time and those maps are permanently available to you you you can't have more than three maps but they don't limit any of the functionality that's built into the maps with the paid version versus the free version and i've got a little little hack for you if you're interested in using it for longer than in having more than three maps kind of available to you is what you can do is you can take any of your maps and one of the nice things that they do is they allow you to export the map and they will allow you to export it into their own native format so you can keep three maps going active inside of your account inside of your online account but you can archive other maps and store them on your computer and then open them when you need to as long as if you close down one of the other three maps that are open it's a little bit of a workaround i suspect if you reach the point that you're doing this that it'll be worth paying for the subscription because this subscription is very affordable and if you're using the tool that much it may well be worth you upgrading but it does extend the functionality of the free version mindmeister is the next of my five favorite free tools that are available to us online the next tool that i'm going to share with you is is in google it's not it's not all of google docs although that could well be you know the google suite the google one suite of google sheets of google docs gmail uh google calendar those are all free and just amazing tools that many of us come to rely on and they've become so base as far as you know kind of a baseline value that we almost don't even think about them as being a free service anymore they're kind of almost like the internet they're just available to us all the time but if we take a step back and think about what we used to pay to say have a license to microsoft office in the past where we can access all of that functionality now in google it's it's an amazing value but i want to drill down a little bit more deep specifically and talk about google forms which in my mind might be the single most valuable tool that is offered for free anywhere online because many of us will pay for different forms packages to collect information and there's a lot of really good forms packages out there but google forms doesn't take a second it doesn't take second place to any of them as far as basic functionality and efficiency and we use it over and over again in our business and most people who discover google forms find that they return to it very often now it's usually project based it's usually based on a project so you'll go maybe weeks or months without using google forms but when you need to collect information from a community google forms is there it's free and my gosh it does a terrific job and as you can see right here we use it all the time for collecting information so effectively google forms has two three parts i guess to google forms you create a form that looks like this where you determine exactly what questions you're asking on the form you can add a header and do layout make it look a little bit prettier but you can add all these different types of information that you want to collect from an individual or from a group so you can you build out your form using this construction tool once you've built your form you use the sharing tool that's built into google forms in order to create a link for people to click on to be able to fill in the information or you can email it to others you can set it up as an embed code on your website so you can share the form which is when it's most useful with a community by email or through your website and then it collects all of the information it stores it in a spreadsheet for you so that you can see all of the responses you can sort them and you can and you can work with the data that you've collected from the individual there are many good forms packages out there that we pay a good monthly fee for in order to use and they are terrific but i don't think any of them does that much better a job to make it worth that investment than does google forms and the fifth and uh one of the superstars of my list of five favorite tools is google forms so i gotta ask you what do you think of my list were there surprises in there were there free tools that you use that you love that i'm missing i mean there's a lot of good candidates out there that didn't make my short list slack for example i love slack for communications didn't make the list as didn't zoom there's quite a few tools that are out there that did not make my list that probably should have been considered but i just chose not to include them for a variety of reasons but i would love to know from you which tools you love to use that are free especially ones that didn't make my list and why do you like them what is so great about them i would love to hear your feedback and see exactly what it is you like to use and with that i gotta thank you very much for spending the time with us today i hope you found this video useful and entertaining if you did a like a share and of course a subscribe would all be greatly appreciated now before we leave i want to let you know that every week here at dottotech we host a free weekly tutorial webinar called webinar wednesday it's a free webinar on some aspect of productivity or content creation i invite you to join us i think you will find it enlightening i hope to see you there till next time i'm steve dotto have fun storming the castle [Music] you

Channel: dottotech

Views: 440,861

Keywords: Best free apps, best free tools, free apps, asana, canva, mindmeister, free project management, free mind mapping, productivity apps, top apps, asana free version, mindmeister free version, canva free version, google forms, scannable, free pdf creation, free business apps, free apps 2022, asana project management, best apps for android, best free android apps, best free ios apps, best free macintosh apps, best free windows apps

Id: aGrOk_ie58g

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 10 2022