The Zapier Blog

PowerPoint Alternatives: The Best Presentation Software in 2017

akunesh@me.com (Andrew Kunesh) — Wed, 31 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

From school classrooms to Apple product launches, slideshow presentations have quickly become the standard accompaniment to lectures. You can't give a speech without a slideshow, it seems. And they all feel same. Presentations are dominated by Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote, apps that are all but omnipresent.

There are good reasons they're so popular: PowerPoint and Keynote come packaged with Microsoft Office and new Macs, respectively, and they've been around for a long time. They're also full of valuable features, from dozens of slide templates to a variety of polished transitions. But knowing how to take advantage of all they offer gets so complicated that there are entire books and courses about them.

Making a delightful and well-designed presentation shouldn't be so hard. That's the aim of a wave of new presentation software, including simpler online versions of PowerPoint and Keynote themselves. These new tools are easier to use, give you the ability to collaborate with others—sometimes in real-time—and allow you to edit your presentation on any internet-connected computer.

What Makes Great Presentation Software Great?

There are occasions that call for a beautifully crafted presentation. That's when you should call a designer or use a service like SketchDeck to craft professional PowerPoint or Keynote slides. Most of the time, though, you just need a simple way to present your thoughts, and perhaps let your colleagues contribute. That's where these new presentation apps excel.

When looking for apps to include in this roundup, we selected tools that:

Make it quick to build a presentation
Have a clean design that's simpler than the traditional PowerPoint
Include unique features that bring something new to the table
Let you easily collaborate on presentations

With each presentation app listed, you'll find a screenshot and description of the app, what it does best, and its starting price. Most of these apps are free, but even if there's a cost, the product is priced competitively with PowerPoint and Keynote.

What you won't find in this list are apps only available for mobile, apps with an emphasis on video, or apps built specifically for sales presentations.

The Best Presentation Software

Google Slides for real-time Google Docs collaboration
Zoho Show for built-in broadcasting options
Slides for a modern take on presentations
Prezi for animated, non-linear presentations
Canva for creative presentations
Swipe for audience engagement features
Haiku Deck for great mobile editing
Slidebean for automatic slide creation
Deckset for easy Markdown-powered presentations
Evernote Presentation Mode to turn notes into a presentation
PowerPoint Online for Microsoft Office compatibility
Keynote for iCloud for beautiful templates

The Best Apps to Share Presentations

SlideShare for sharing your presentation
Speaker Deck for embedding presentations on your site
SlideDog for mixing in multimedia and live-sharing
Poll Everywhere for polling your audience
Presentain for easy presentation recording and posting
Present.me for publishing an online presentation

Google Slides for real-time collaboration

Google Slides has become the gold standard of collaborative cloud-based presentation software. It's a part of the popular Google Docs suite, and is a solid—if bare-boned—presentation app. After selecting a pre-made theme for the slideshow, you'll make your presentation in a simple online app that's similar to other Google tools. You'll find most of the standard presentation software features, including animations and slide transitions, and it's very beginner friendly—anyone should be able to pick up Google Slides and quickly begin making presentations.

Google Slides really shines when it comes to collaboration. All you need is a Google account to be added to a Google Slide presentation to begin making real-time edits. Collaborators can chat with the built-in IM functionality, so group projects become a lot easier. Additionally, all edits are logged, so you can view all revisions made by your collaborators.

Google Slides Pricing: Free; extra storage from $1.99/month for 100GB

Zoho Show for built-in broadcasting options

Zoho Show is part of the Zoho Docs suite, an online alternative to Microsoft Office and Google Docs. It offers a no-frills way to make slideshows from your web browser. Zoho Show's interface is reminiscent of both newer and older versions of PowerPoint, with a tabbed interface and simple drop-down menus. If you're used to PowerPoint, you will love how Zoho Show lets you create content instantly by clicking into pre-made text boxes to add text to slides and apply themes with a single click.

Its best feature, though, may be "broadcast", which lets you remotely present slideshows in real time to anyone on the web. Viewers can view the broadcast in their browser after you've shared it with an email or link, and when combined with a conference call, it can make for a great remote lecture tool. Even if you'll be presenting in person, you could use this to practice your presentation ahead of time.

Zoho Show Pricing: Free; extra storage and features from $5/month

Slides for a modern take on presentations

If you want to get creative and customize your own slide themes, the simply named app Slides is perfect for you. This HTML5-based presentation tool lets you create your own slide styles using beautiful fonts, shapes, smooth transitions, and color sets that look great in any modern browser. These presentations are then hosted on the web and can be shared with ease.

Slides' best feature is its clean interface—modern and fresh, with a unique design that shows tools as you need them in a sidebar. It doesn't require digging through menus to get to special design tools, which is something that can't be said for other presentation apps.

If you're a web developer or designer, Slides is especially great for you. It includes code syntax highlighting out-of-the-box, and with its Pro plan, you can add custom CSS to your presentations for easy styling and branding.

Slides Pricing: Free for public presentations; $5/month Lite plan for private presentations and more; $10/month Pro plan for collaboration and more; $20/mo Team plan for custom branding.

Prezi for animated, non-linear presentations

Prezi is a new take on the traditional slideshow. Combining animation with the information you'd include in a traditional presentation, it's a simple way to make a dynamic, non-linear show that's far more than just a slideshow.

When creating a Prezi, you're prompted to select a theme that goes with the topic of your presentation and add content to frames within the presentation. These frames can be animated signs, planets floating in space (pictured), or a slew of other objects depending on the theme you choose. Frames take the place of slides; they still have text and headings, but their backgrounds are all shared and technically everything is part of one large slide.

As you proceed through your presentation, Prezi will zoom in and out of the background to show each of your frames. Instead of a parade of static images, your presentation will be a dynamic visual tool, perfect for keeping your presentations interesting even if your subject matter is dull. And you'll have spent less time making the Prezi than you would have spent picking out boring PowerPoint transitions for each slide.

Prezi Pricing: Free for public presentations; $7/mo "Standard" plan for private presentations; $19/mo "Plus" plan for offline editing and advanced tools; $59/mo "Premium" plan for training, phone support, and analytics.

Canva for creative presentations

Though Canva is primarily a design app, you can make some pretty wicked slideshows with it. The app includes a large library of stock images, backgrounds, and specially formatted text boxes that, with a bit of creativity, can be used to make polished image-focused slides. The whole interface is drag-and-drop, so you can tweak your slideshow to look exactly the way you want.

Canva also has a wide range of built-in layouts for any occasion: from professional presentations to travel guides. These layouts can be customized using the same drag-and-drop tools and are be great starting points for corporate branded presentations.

Canva Pricing: Free, with paid images and layouts starting at $1

Swipe for interactive slides

Swipe, another great tool for simple presentations, lets you quickly make slides by dragging and dropping in the multimedia elements you want to include. It then lets you pick solid color backgrounds and add text with Markdown formatting. Then, present your presentation online, letting others follow along in real time.

We've seen those features before in other separate apps, but bringing them together makes for a compelling—if basic—presentation app. But then, in a surprising twist, it also lets you add polls to your slides to gather live feedback from your audience. While you're giving your presentation, anyone following along on their own device can answer your poll and the results will be shown in real-time.

Swipe Pricing: Free for 2 presentations; starting at $15/mo for unlimited presentations and extra features.

Haiku Deck for great mobile editing

Haiku Deck is a basic presentation software with a limited selection of themes, slide layouts, and formatting options. Its navigation is extremely simple with all of the options and tools available from the home screen. If you're wanting a no-frills presentation creation experience, you'll love this app.

When you create a presentation on Haiku Deck, you have the option of uploading it to the service's gallery of presentations. This searchable library is available for viewing for free and is a great way to share your knowledge with the world.

But Haiku Deck's most useful and unique feature is their artificial intelligence tool, Haiku Deck Zuru. Zuru works with an outline or existing presentation and builds your slides for you, assembling slide formats and choosing images and styles. This tool is ideal for someone who needs a sleek presentation but doesn't have the time or skill to assemble the slide deck themselves.

Haiku Deck Pricing: Free for 1 public presentation; private plans starting at $9.99/mo for the basic plan.

Slidebean for automatic slide creation

If you want to skip the tedious process of formatting presentations, Slidebean is right up your alley. When starting a new presentation, all you have to do is curate the text, images, and videos you want to include. Then, select a theme and Slidebean will create a presentation for you, complete with formatting.

After making final edits to your slideshow, you can choose to download your presentation or present it from the web. This—combined with Slidebean's quick slide creation—makes the service a great option if you find yourself needing to create a presentation in a pinch.

Slidebean Pricing: Plans start at $24/mo.

Deckset for easy Markdown-powered presentations

If you keep good notes but dislike the process of turning said notes into presentations, Deckset for Mac is just what you need. Simply take notes in your favorite text editor, format them with Markdown (pictured), and separate them into sections with dashes. Then import them to Deckset, select a template, and Deckset will do the rest—it takes your notes and creates slides without any help, making for no-hassle last-minute presentations.

If you're a writer who uses Markdown, you'll love how easy Deckset makes it is to turn your writing into a presentation. And if you're a developer and need to present code to an audience, you'll dig how Deckset will automatically recognize your code and apply syntax highlighting in your presentations.

Unlike the other apps in this list, Deckset is a Mac app that lives on your desktop, so it doesn't have the cloud-backed simplicity of working from anywhere or collaborating with others. Deckset's simplicity, however, is hard to beat, and if you save your work to Dropbox or use a collaborative writing app to draft your presentation notes, you'll get the best of both worlds.

Deckset Pricing: $26.99 on the Mac App Store

Evernote Presentation Mode to turn notes into a presentation

Or, there's another even simpler way to turn your notes into a presentation: the new Presentation Mode in Evernote Premium. Just write your notes in Evernote as normal, complete with lists, attached files, and formatted text. You can use just one note or select several notes together and Evernote will automatically make a table of contents for your presentation sections.

Then, when it's time to present, just open your notes, click the slide screen icon in the toolbar, and Evernote will turn them into an easy-to-read presentation. There are no transitions or animations, but there is a simple virtual laser pointer so you can point out the most important stuff.

Evernote Pricing: $69.99/year for Evernote Premium to access presentation mode.

PowerPoint Online for Microsoft Office compatibility

If you're not ready to ditch PowerPoint completely, but still want something simpler, online, and cheaper, PowerPoint Online is right up your alley. This free web app from Microsoft gives you all the basic features of the desktop version of PowerPoint, for free, in your web browser. The app's interface is almost identical to that of PowerPoint 2013 and offers PowerPoint's familiar drawing tools and iconic templates.

Because PowerPoint Online syncs your presentations to OneDrive, you can start a making presentation using a desktop copy of PowerPoint and then edit and present using PowerPoint Online. This is especially useful if you have multiple computers and only one license for Office.

PowerPoint Online Pricing: Free; extra storage from $1.99/month for 50GB

Keynote for iCloud for beautiful templates

Like PowerPoint Online, Keynote for iCloud is an online version of its popular desktop namesake. Its interface is very similar to the app's mobile iteration, Keynote for iPad, and the "iCloud" in its name means it syncs presentations to both the mobile and desktop Keynote app. While Keynote for iCloud may not have all of the features of its desktop counterpart, it is great for quickly creating beautiful slideshows on the web, and includes the simple collaboration features you'd expect in a web app.

Apple has included pre-made templates for every occasion, with sleek lines and polished graphics, and includes more typefaces than any other app in this list. Additionally, Keynote for iCloud's transitions and animations are extremely smooth, just as in its desktop counterparts.

Keynote for iCloud Pricing: Free with all Macs and iOS devices; extra storage from $0.99/month for 50GB

Share Your Presentations

Now that you've created beautiful and informational presentations, you'll want feedback on your work before the big day. Then, you'll want an easy way to share your presentations with the world.

There are plenty of great apps for this, too. From collaborating with others to distributing your slideshows, each of these tools has a unique strength.

SlideShare for sharing your presentation

If you've made an awesome presentation that you'd like to the world to see, upload it to SlideShare. It's the presentation social network owned by LinkedIn and is to presentations what YouTube is to videos.

Your slideshow will be added in the website's database of presentations—now more than 15 million of them—making it easy for anyone to search through its text and flip through the slides. It's an easy way to share your knowledge and build a portfolio of content that is connected to your LinkedIn account.

SlideShare Pricing: Free

Speaker Deck for embedding presentations on your site

When used correctly, presentations can be great marketing tools for your website. However, before you can take advantage of this marketing technique, you have to find a way to embed presentations on your website. That's where Speaker Deck comes in.

In order to use Speaker Deck, you must export your PowerPoint or Keynote presentation as a PDF. Once uploaded, the service will split each page of your PDF into individual slides and give you an embed code. Additionally, your presentation will be available for viewing on Speaker Deck's catalog of slideshows.

Speaker Deck Pricing: Free

SlideDog for mixing in multimedia and live-sharing

Sometimes presentations can go beyond your slide deck, needing to incorporate websites, PDF, videos or even slides from another presentation app. That's when SlideDog can become your best friend. This app was made to make your presentations seamless, no matter how nervous you are at showtime. On top of allowing users to put multiple media formats in a timeline, the tool offers live-sharing and interactive features, such as polls and feedback forms.

SlideDog also comes with a companion smartphone remote app that lets you control your presentation without touching your computer. You can use this remote to change slides, switch presentations, and even play and pause videos. Think of it as the slideshow clicker you'll never forget at home.

SlideDog Pricing: Free; pro features from $8.33/mo

Poll Everywhere for polling your audience

Poll Everywhere makes it simple to engage your audience with a real-time poll, pulling in responses from mobile phones, Twitter or web browsers. You can employ it either as a standalone polling app alongside your presentation or if you're a PowerPoint user with Windows, you can tie it into the software with Poll Everywhere's PollEv Presenter App.

Poll Everywhere Pricing: Free for 25 responses per poll; more responses and features starting from $19/month.

Presentain for easy presentation recording and posting

Presentain is a presentation companion, ready to help you engage with your audience like Poll Everywhere. Its stand-out feature lets you record your presentation audio, combine it with a recording of your slides, and upload it as a video online. It's easy "slidecast" creation that makes clever use of your phone's microphone.

Presentain Pricing: Pay for what you need—you can choose your Presentain plan based on unlimited use by Day, Week, Month, or Year.

Present.me for publishing an online presentation

If you want to share your slides alongside a video of you delivering the presentation, but didn't record a live presentation or have one to capture in the first place, Present.me will come to the rescue. This app allows you to do just that—and also has options for slides with audio recording only, slide deck only, or video only.

Present.me Pricing: $9.99/month for 5 active recordings and basic features; $17.95/month for 30 active recordings and advanced features; $49/mo for team features.

Have a favorite presentation tool not listed, a unique tip for one of these apps, or a clever presentation hack, such as relying on Google's Chromecast? We'd love to hear about it in the comments below!

Zapier marketers Danny Schreiber and Matthew Guay contributed to this post.

Credits: Presentation icon courtesy XOXO.

How to Build Your Own Slack Bot

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Wed, 31 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

You're discussing a problem with your team and need a link to the bug to show them exactly what you're talking about. You could open your browser, search for the bug, and, once you find it, then paste it into your conversation. Or you could just type the bug's name in your chat app, and a bot could find the bug info and share it in the conversation automatically. Or perhaps you need to find someone's contact info and then send them an invoice. Just type their name, and a bot can do both in seconds.

Bots are handy little assistants that hang out in your app, wait for commands, and then find or create the thing you need. They're another way to use your favorite apps without needing to open those apps, running automated tasks for you. They're the big new thing—a core part of Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram's newest features—and yet they're often too complicated to build and use.

Turns out, bots are simple enough for anyone to make. Here's how you can make a Slack Bot to do anything you want in a few minutes without any coding—along with a dozen examples of bots that real teams are using today, and a Slack bot cheat sheet for a handy reference to help build your own bots.

What Is a Bot?
What Do You Need to Build a Bot?
What Types of Bots Can I Build?
How to Build a Bot in Slack
Bots That Help Teams Get Work Done From Slack

What Is a Bot?

A robot on stage, and a bot in Slack

Robots can drive cars across the surface of mars, clean nuclear reactors, and cut precise holes in the body of your smartphone.

Bots are a little different. They live in your apps, not in the physical world. Rather than working assembly lines, they focus processing power on looking up facts and sending notifications right when you need them. They're tiny programs without buttons or icons. Instead of clicking a search button, you'll type a command like /giphy volcano to instruct the bot to find what you're looking for (a volcano gif from Giphy, in this case).

Bots are a buzzword right now, the big new thing in chat tools such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and Skype, as well as in personal voice assistants, such as Amazon Alexa.

And yet, they're not exactly that new of an idea. Google, in many ways, is a bot that can answer lots of questions. Search for current time SF, and you'll get the current time in San Francisco just by typing.

DOS-era programs also behaved much like a bot. Open Terminal on your Mac and type uptime, or open Command Prompt on your PC and type net statistics server, and an age-old bot will tell you how long your computer's been turned on.

Uptime and Whois website info from a tiny Terminal command

Handy, right? Instead of finding the right app and clicking the right button, you just type in a quick command and get what you want.

Perhaps you don't want to use Terminal all day—and you want something more personalized than Google offers. Say you want to find internal contact info, or make an invoice, or decide where to grab lunch as a team. You don't need a new app, and you don't need to open Google. All you need is your own bot, inside an app you're already using.

What Do You Need to Build a Slack Bot?

Zapier is the perfect tool to power your bots

You only need 3 things to build a bot:

A place to type your text
A bot to read your text
An app to do something with your text

All bots need to start is some text—the text you type that tells them what to do. That could be a Tweet (with Twitter bots that reply with flight status, say), a text message (like the y or n messages you send to your carrier to change your phone plan), or perhaps an email. Chat apps, though, are the perfect place for bots. Odds are, you use them already, and they include both a text box to type commands into and a conversation view to see what the bot replies.

Team chat app Slack is the perfect place to build bots for anything you need—and what we'll focus on in this tutorial. It's free to start using, and it's a tool where you likely already discuss ideas and projects with your team—with a text box that's perfect for sending commands to your bot.

Bots come built into Slack. We'll look at how to set them up in a minute. Essentially, you give the bot a name, tell it where to watch, and when you type a specific word or symbol, the bot will start listening and then send that text to your app.

Apps are the tricky part. They're famously difficult to build, and are the one step that might be keeping you from building your own bots. But they don't have to be that difficult. You could code your own app, or you could use pre-built integrations from Zapier instead.

Zapier is a tool that connects your apps without any complicated code, so you can pass data between them. Using Zaps, or integrations inside Zapier, you can connect Slack to hundreds of other apps just by clicking through a simple wizard. For example, once you build a Slack Zap, it can watch for commands in any chat channel and kick off a workflow in another app, or track down info in one tool and send it back to Slack. That's how you can build the most powerful bots in your own Zapier-powered slash commands, as we'll walk you through below.

So let's use all 3, and see what type of bots we can build.

What Types of Slack Bots Can I Build?

Our WolframAlpha-powered bot that can answer questions and perform conversions in Slack

The first time you open Slack, you'll be greeted by a friendly Slackbot that asks your name and time zone. Type in the replies, and your account will be personalized without a click, like magic.

You can then harness that magic yourself with your own bots. These come in three varieties:

Slackbot Responses

Add simple replies for things everyone needs to know

The simplest bots come built into your Slack settings. You add a phrase for the Slackbot to watch for, and then tell it how to respond.

Say you want a simple way to find the security code for your office: just tell Slackbot to watch for messages that say office security code, then have it respond with the number. You could make more whimsical prank bots that send GIFs—or more serious bots to share important phone numbers, email addresses, or other helpful info.

To make a Slackbot Response, just go to slack.com/customize/slackbot and add the phrase and response you want. These will automatically work in any channel other than your personal Slackbot channel.

Or, you can make your own custom bots in Slack that watch Slack for text and automatically reply, either with the bot API or Zapier. We'll look at that below.

Notification Bots

Get notified about anything you want, right inside Slack

Notification bots are the next easiest Slackbot to make. Instead of watching Slack for a phrase you type, they watch another app for an update and send it to Slack.

They look like another user in Slack, with their own name and icon. They'll show up every so often when there's something new—a news update, new document, or trending hashtag, perhaps—and post it to your Slack channels.

There are dozens of notification bots for social networks, news, and more in the Slack App Directory. Or, you can build your own notification bots with Zapier—perhaps even using a pre-made Slack integration that you can set up in a few clicks.

We'll look at how to make these in just a minute—but here are some popular Slack integrations if you can't wait.

Slash Commands

Build powerful workflows with slash command bots to do work right from chat

If you're looking for a bot that you can summon at will, though, slash commands are your best bet. Unlike notification-based bots, slash command bots wait for your signal, then perform some sort of task based on context that you provide.

You trigger them by typing a / followed by their name (/giphy, say, for the Giphy bot), and then type in a command. The bot will then find what you're looking for and post it back to Slack in a reply.

Bots can do just about anything you want: start a new meeting, compute a value, do research, and more. For that, you'll need to either code your own app or use Zapier integrations to connect Slack to over 700 of your favorite apps.

How to Build a Bot in Slack

Now that you know the type of bots you can build, it's time to make your own. Let's look at how you can make customized bots in Slack for replies, notifications, and commands—all without writing a line of code.

Building a Slack Reply Bot

Slackbot's default reply tool is rather limited, since it can only post the same response every time. What if you want a customized response—or perhaps a random response—each time?

Have Zapier watch for messages posted anywhere in Slack

For that, a Zapier-powered reply bot is your best option. First you'll need to create a Zapier account or log into your Zapier account.

Then, click the Make a Zap button in the top right corner, and select Slack as your Trigger app. On the next page, have your Zap watch Slack for a new message posted anywhere. Alternately, if you want this bot to only work in one channel, you could have Zapier watch that specific channel.

Choose the field you want Zapier to watch

Then you'll need a filter to watch for a specific term—otherwise, your bot would run every time anything is posted to Slack. Add another action to your Zap, this time selecting the Filter by Zapier app. In its settings, have it watch the Text field for the term you want.

Tell Zapier what to watch for

If you want the bot to run whenever those words are posted to Slack, then have the filter watch for (Text) Contains. Otherwise, if you want it to only watch for that specific phrase on its own, have the filter watch for (Text) Exactly matches.

Then, you can add your reply, creating a basic bot. Just add another step to your Zap, selecting the Slack app and the Send Channel Message action. There, in the Channel field, select "Choose a custom value" and then select the channel name from your original Slack message so the reply will end up in the same spot.

All that's left is to type in the message you want to post in the "Message Text" box. Scroll on down, and you can add a name and icon to your bot—or have it post to Slack using your name, if you want. Save and turn on your Zap, and it'll send your customized message every time.

For something more customized, though, try a Formatter action before your bot's reply. Formatter is a handy tool that can format your text, calculate values, choose random values from a list, and more.

Say you want to make a birthday bot that sends a random GIF from a list whenever someone says "Happy birthday!" Our filter above is already watching for the correct phrase—all we need now is the Pick from list Formatter, and a few GIFs.

To add the Formatter action, click the Continue button or + on the left sidebar of your Zap to add a new action, and choose the Formatter by Zapier app. Then, select the Pick from list formatter in the Transform field, and enter the GIF links in the Input fields.

With that done, repeat those steps, only this time select Slack as your action app, and choose its Send Channel Message action. Then, in the message text box, add your birthday message and click the plus button on the right to add your random GIF from Formatter. Turn your Zap on, and the next time someone says "happy birthday" they'll get surprised with one of your GIFs.

Building a Slack Notification Bot

Notification bots are even easier to build in Zapier. All you need is an app or site to watch for notifications, and Zapier can automatically send those to Slack for you.

Say you want to be notified in Slack whenever new tasks are added to your Trello kanban board. First make a new Zap for Trello–with the "Make a Zap with Trello" button. Then, in the Choose Trigger step, select New Card to have it watch Trello for new cards on the board you want to watch.

Next, click the plus sign + to add a Slack action. Now you can set the Zap to send a message either to a channel or as a direct message to anyone on your team. You can customize the message with any text you want. Click the + icon on the right of the message text field in Zapier to add info from Trello about the card, such its name, link, description, and more.

You can quickly make Slack notification bots for any of the 700+ apps that connect to Zapier, or with any site that uses RSS. Here are some popular integrations to get started with in a few clicks:

Building a Slack Slash Command Bot

You can build an interactive Slack app without coding

Now you're ready to build the most advanced bots in Slack: slash commands. They're the bots that wait for a command and then do whatever you asked. Make a document, find an email address, start a call, log records–you can make a bot for that and more.

It all starts by adding a new app to your Slack account. Go to api.slack.com/apps, select Create New App, enter a name for your app, and select the correct Slack account where you want to use the new Slack bot.

Slack will then show some options to add features to your app. You can add bot users, interactive messages, and more—but each of those require coding. Instead, we're going to select the Slash Commands button. Click Create New Command, then it's time to set your bot up.

First, add a command with a slash in front of it—perhaps /contact if you want to look up contact info, /weather to build a weather bot, or anything else that fits your needs. You can then add a short description and usage hint

We skipped one field—the Request URL. Here, you'll add a Webhook URL where Slack will send the data you typed to the command. You can use that to code your own app, pulling out the text, username, and other data from Slack from the webhook.

We're going to build our bot without coding—so we'll use Zapier's Webhook integration to capture the data from Slack and put it to work. Let's grab that URL first.

In a new tab or window, make a new Zap using Zapier's Webhooks app. Select Catch Hook when setting up the Webhook integration, click Continue on the options (you don't need to add anything here), then copy the Webhook link you'll see in the testing page.

With that Webhook link copied, go back to your Slack slash command's configuration page from before and paste the link into the Request URL field—and then save your settings.

Now it's time to test your slash command so we can build the rest of its Zapier integration. Just open Slack, type in your command followed by text you'd like to use in the bot. I'm building a bot that will find contacts in Google Contacts and send me their email address in Slack, so I'll enter a name that I can use to search Google Contacts.

It's time to make our bot smart. Go back to the tab where you'd opened Zapier, and click the OK I did this button for your webhook step. Zapier will find the data from your slash command, and you'll be ready to put it to work.

Now, it's time to use the data. Here are some quick ideas to try with Zapier integrations:

Use Formatter to split your text into sections, format the text, calculate numbers, and more.
Use Searches and Lookups to find info in your favorite apps—perhaps to find an entry in a spreadsheet, a contact in a CRM, a customer from your payment app, and more. There are also searches in apps like Giphy that can find info online based on your query.
Use standard Zapier Actions to save info to your apps—say to add a new contact, create a document, log time spent on a task, and more.

Let's try using a search to find a contact from Google Contacts account. Add an action to the Zap, select Google Contact, then use the Find Contact action. Have it search by name, then select the text from your Slash Action as the search query.

Now that Zapier's found your contact, it's time to send it back to Slack. Just add another action to your Zap, and select the Send Channel Message action. Instead of selecting a specific Slack Channel to post the message to, choose Use a Custom Value at the bottom of the channel list, then use the Channel Name field from your webhook to select the channel where the slash command was used.

All you need to do now is create your message. Click the + icon beside the Message Text field to add any info you found from the Zapier search. Then, customize the bot, adding the same name and icon image as you added to Slack previously.

Test the Zap, and you'll get the response in Slack you wanted.

Now, anytime you need a contact—or whatever you built your bot for—just type your slash command followed by the text you need to use, and Zapier will do the work for you automatically.

Want to build a more advanced bot? Try adding extra steps to your Zap—perhaps to create a template document and then post it to Slack—or use Code Steps to create advanced bots without having to code a full app.

Or, for the most advanced bots, try using Named Variables to gather more than one text item at once. Just decide what you want to gather with the bot, and a standardized name for each item, then write them followed by parentheses with the values you want. For example, say you want to gather a name and email in your bot. In Slack, type Name(Bob Smith) Email(bob@gmail.com), and Zapier will recognize each as a separate item you can use in subsequent actions.

You can see your full Slack message or the individual elements in Zapier

Then, when you build your Zap, you can select the Name and Email fields individually to add them as a new contact in Google Contacts.

With those powerful tools, combined with the hundreds of apps that connect to Zapier, you can build bots that do anything you want.

Example Bots That Help Teams Get Work Done From Slack

You could make a bot for anything—but what would actually be a useful bot for your team?

On the Zapier team, we have a number of bots both for play and productivity. The oldest slash command on our account is a GoToMeeting integration: Type /gtm anywhere in our Slack, and a bot uses Zapier to make a new GoToMeeting link and share it in the conversation for a quick way to jump on a call with team members.

Need to reserve a server for testing? /reserve does that in Zapier's Slack. /afk lets us tell the team if we'll be out of office like those old AIM away messages, /compute finds answers from Wolfram|Alpha, and /random gives us an easy way to make decisions with random numbers. And, when it's time to unwind, /spyfall starts a text-based game of Spyfall using direct messages to tell each player their role.

But that only scratches the surface of what bots can do in Slack. Here are some other great Zapier-powered bots for Slack—ones that just might fit needs your team has, too.

Write Invoices and Emails

Tired of writing the same emails over and over? The Billfixers team was, too, so they built a bot to write emails.

"The need that prompted both of them was trying to find ways to increase our efficiency instead of doing things by hand, but without having to add a bunch more applications to our workflow," says Billfixers co-founder Ben Kurland. "It was just time on our end that we weren't actually using to help our customer, just to do what was essentially data entry."

So, when they need to tell a customer that they just saved them money on a bill or need to send along an invoice, they can now send that person's name to their bot. It finds their info in SalesforceIQ, uses some code to calculate the savings, creates a draft email in Gmail, then shares it to Slack. "From there, a human can add finishing touches and spend their time adding meaningful interaction with our clients, rather than having to act as a robot themselves," says Kurland.

That worked so well, they also built another bot to create invoices in Freshbooks right from Slack.

Find Email Addresses and Other Data

Google is great for web searches—but when you need to find a contact's email or a specific item in your database, it's often far harder to find what you need. You have to remember which app to check, open that app, search, and finally find what you're looking for.

Or, you could just use bots in Slack to help with all of your searches, as the 90 Minute Books team does.

Their set of search bots started out with a $whois bot built by co-founder Stuart Bell. You post someone's email address to this bot, and it searches FullContact then returns their full contact info to Slack.

They then added a bot to shorten links, and another to generate a Book ID for new book projects. And when they need more info about a book, the $gogo bot will find all of the info about a book project from its ID.

"It gives people visibility without needing access," says Bell. "And even for the team that do have access, a quick check often saves them having to log in to a different tool.

Choose Lunch Destinations

"What's for lunch?" is a question everyone's asked—and when it's time to have a team lunch, it's a question that's hard to solve.

"Lunch is a serious matter, with Livestorm being French," says CEO Gilles Bertaux. "We usually spend a lot of time looking for a place and then debate about it. So we thought it would be nice to have a little something that could help us decide and experience new meals."

And so, they built a food bot with Zapier and Slack. They scraped the best lunch options with delivery near their office from Yelp using Import.io, and saved them to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Then, with a Schedule Zap, they have the bot run at the same time every day, choosing a random restaurant from the spreadsheet and posting it to Slack.

It gave them handy food recommendations right when they needed them—and has inspired them to make a better curated database for more customized lunch recommendations than Yelp's top listings.

Find Bug Info Automatically

Bots even make sure the apps for shows like The Voice UK and Britan's Got Talent work perfectly. Tellybug, the team behind those and other tools to make TV shows engaging, wanted a simple way to collaborate on bug reports right from Slack.

"People would mention a bug number in Slack (or on a call) and then everyone would have to go search to look up the bug," says Tellybug CTO Malcolm Box. "This seemed automatable."

So, with a Zapier-powered Slack reply bot, the Tellybug team built a Zap that watches Slack for mentions of bugs. Whenever it finds one, it searches for the bug in Fogbugz, their bug tracking app. Then, with some filters and code to pull out the relevant info, the bot posts the correct info about the bug back into Slack.

"The bot's made it much easier to have discussions about bugs and to keep everyone on the same page when doing bug triage," says Box.

Run Standup Meetings in Chat

You need to know what each person on your team is working on, but you might not need to waste time with a full meeting. Instead, you could rely on a bot like the Robots and Pencils team does.

Each weekday, their bot posts a Standup Time reminder with questions about what they're working on. Each team member can then reply, using Zapier Named Variables to list replies to each question. A Zap then saves each response to a Google Sheets spreadsheet for a log of each virtual meeting. "From here I can put together some cool burndown charts based on other spreadsheets I have created," writes product manager Ben Myers.

Add Tasks to Your To-do List

Or, if you just need a simple way to add tasks to your project, a bot can handle that, too. Parabol CEO Jordan Husney does just that with a bot, for a quick way to add tasks to Trello that come up during their Slack-powered standup meetings.

Once again using Named Variables in Zapier, he posts a new task to his jrtask bot, and Zapier turns that text into a new card in Trello. "Lowering the friction of capturing tasks means spending more time staying focused on the task in front of you," writes Husney—which is exactly what his Trello and Slack bot does.

Remind Your Team to Submit Timesheets

Want to spend less time reminding your team about regular tasks—and want to make sure you don't come across as nagging?

"I found myself often sending random timesheet reminder memes to my team, so I automated this," says devPHASE lead developer Matt Healy. So, with a bit of PHP code to pull a random timesheet meme from Google Images, and a Zap to post that image along with a reminder into Slack, he automated that task away.

Then, as Healy says, "hilarity and timesheet completion ensues."

For a more powerful workflow, you could make a companion timesheet tool similar to the standup meeting bot above that lets your team post their time logs to your time tracking app right from Slack.

Learn About Your Team Members

Automated Insights builds tools to turn data into stories automatically—and they wanted the same automated insights about their own team. So, during a team hackathon, director of customer experience Matt Nisonger and his team turned their employee directory into a bot.

"Our head of HR collects a lot of information about each employee's personal interests, hobbies, etc., but never did anything with it," says Nisonger. "That spawned the idea of using a Slack bot to learn interesting things about new and existing employees."

With a Typeform for to survey the team, Google Sheets to save the data, and their own Wordsmith app to turn the data into stories, they had everything needed to build a bot.

Now, when a new team member joins the team, they're asked to fill out the survey, and the bot shares info about the new team member in Slack. And if you ever want some trivia about someone on the team, just send their name to the bot and it'll reply with a fun fact about them.

That's only one of the many ways the Automated Insights team uses bots. "we probably have 10-20 various bots integrated with Slack, everything from Intercom to bug reporting to server status reporting," says Nisonger. "Some are better than others, but overall they've been positive for productivity."

Create Support Tickets Inside Conversations

Want to make sure problems are solved for your team as quickly as possible? You could build a bot for that, as the Business Insider team did.

"Our team's main communication tool is Slack, and we wanted to make it super easy for anyone on the team to submit a ticket through Slack," says Business Insider team member Kyle Dowley. All their team has to do is use their ticket bot and post the problem they're having. That has Zapier check Google Sheets for that team member's contact info, then uses it and the Slack message to create a ticket in Zendesk. When that's done, the Zap sends that team member a direct message in Slack to let them know the ticket's been created—and also gives them a link to the FAQ to perhaps help them find a solution on their own.

"For many people, using this bot is now the preferred method of submitting support requests to our team," says Dowley. "It helps to make sure all support requests are in one place with better tracking and visibility."

And it's simple to use: you can ask other team members if they're having the same problem, then turn the issue into a ticket right from the same Slack conversation.

Download a Slack Bot Cheat Sheet

Now that you know how to build a bot, it's time to build your own. But you'll need a way to keep track of each step to make sure you can make every bot you need.

Just check out the cheat sheet below—or download a PDF copy—to make sure you never forget how to build bots in Slack.

Go Build Your Own Bots!

Building your own robot is difficult. You'd need motors, controllers, gears, and dozens of other parts—not to mention time to code the robot and get it working the way you want.

Bots? They only take a few minutes, and they're free!

Just make a Zapier account, open Slack, and start building a robotic buddy who can lend you a hand. Or, try building a similar bot with Twitter, HipChat, Telegram, SMS messages, or any other chat-like tool Zapier supports. Need a simpler way to make appointments, a filtered notification tool that doesn't ding every minute, or a detailed workflow to build documents in a second? You can make a bot for that.

What will your bot do?

Made a great bot in Slack or another chat app? We'd love to hear about it in the comments below!

Honda Asimo robot photo by Satoru Fujiwara via Flickr.

The 6 Best Office Suites for Your Documents, Spreadsheets, and Presentations

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Tue, 30 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

Documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and notes—they're the files that make work work, that showcase your new project and last quarter's performance and your ideas for the future. They're such a crucial part of computing, it's hard to imagine a computer today without an office suite.

For years—decades even—that meant it was hard to imagine a computer without Microsoft Office. Today, it's easy if you try. Office has more and better competitors than ever, while at the same time the features we need from office tools have changed—things like collaboration, offline and online access, and compatibility with multiple devices.

Microsoft Office 365, Google G Suite, Zoho Workplace, Apple iWork, Quip, and LibreOffice are the biggest office suite players today. Which set of tools should you use? You might already have an older office suite and are wondering if you should upgrade to Office 365—or if the G Suite tools in your Gmail account are enough. Or maybe you're trying to decide which suite to roll out to your team.

We reviewed the best features in these office apps to help you pick the suite that fits your needs best.

The 6 Best Office Suites:

App	Best for:	Free for:	Paid Plans from:
Office 365	Office compatibility with desktop and tablet apps	Personal online apps	$6.99/mo. personal; $10/mo. per user Business
G Suite	Collaborating with a team in online documents	Personal online apps	$5/mo. per user
Apple iWork	Making stylish files in minutes on Apple devices	Full features with Mac or iOS device
Zoho Workplace	30+ apps in one suite	25 users & 5GB storage	$3/mo. per user
Quip	a new, paper-free approach to office	Personal use	$25/mo. for 5 users
LibreOffice	A free desktop office suite	Full features

What Do You Need in an Office Suite?

For years, the most important thing in an office suite was how well it opened Microsoft Office files, because Office was—and still is—the office suite most commonly used in companies big and small. Someone would email you a .doc or .xls file, you'd add edits, then send it back. If your programs didn't show the files the same way, the documents would slowly become a mess.

Compatibility is still important—and in this roundup, the first screenshot for each office suite shows a standard Word document to test how well it imports files. But other features matter, too, especially today.

Collaboration is perhaps most important in a modern office suite. Instead of emailing a file to a colleague, you can send them a link to your file and view it together online. Web apps made compatibility somewhat of a lesser concern since everyone can use the same apps if you're working online.

Mobile is equally important. You might add details to a draft document from your phone on the train, then your boss could approve them from a tablet during a flight, trusting the changes will magically sync up once they're back online. That should just work in today's workplace, especially when so many teams are distributed and we tend to work on the go.

Although files and styles change, at the core you still need tools to organize your ideas, crunch numbers, and turn them into something that works for your team. Each of these suites does that in their own unique ways. You might find one that fits your needs—or you may end up with a traditional office suite installed on your computer while also using another set of online apps to collaborate with your team.

Microsoft Office 365 (Web, Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)

Best for Office compatibility with desktop and tablet apps

The first word processor most of us used, Word is still a great tool for writing documents

This is not the Office you grew with.

Traditionally, you'd buy a boxed copy of Office for $100 or more and install it from CDs on your computer. That'd give you Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, along with extra tools like Outlook and Access depending on the version of Office you purchased.

Office 365 changed that all. From $6.99/month, you can get every Office app on all your devices. Or you can use the free Office Online versions of these programs from your browser or the nearly full-featured mobile apps so you can get work done anywhere.

Office Online lets you view and edit your files from any browser

Start a Word document on your PC at home, add some edits from your phone, then print it off from your browser once you get to the office. You can collaborate online in Office Online, editing a document along with a colleague in Word Online or adding comments to an Excel Online spreadsheet that your coworker can check later.

Office's apps each include more features than those in most of the suites in this roundup, with decades of development behind each one. Excel includes an impressive number of functions and data analysis tools, while OneNote is one of the most innovative notes apps with a paper-like layout that lets you write where you want. There are new apps in the suite, too, like the modern presentation tool Sway and Delve, a smart tool to automatically find the files you need.

OneNote is a unique take on a notebook app

If you plan to work from a desktop computer or tablet most of the time—and don't want to work from your browser—Microsoft Office is still likely your best option for most office work. Its apps are some of the best ways to make documents and spreadsheets, with enough collaboration features and new apps to make them work in the modern office. Office 365 also includes 1TB of storage in OneDrive so you can backup your files online with the same subscription. And there's an entire ecosystem of plugins and templates from Office's decades on the market that can help you get more from its apps.

Office 365 Tools Included: Word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, notes, database builder (on PCs), email, file sync
Office 365 Excel Spreadsheet Functions Supported: 465
Office 365 Price: Free Office Online web apps; $6.99/month Personal plan for individual use; $9.99/ month Home for up to 5 PCs or Macs; from $10/month Business plan for company use per user

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Office 365 review .

See Office 365 integrations on Zapier

Google G Suite (Web, Android, iOS)

Best for collaborating with a team in online documents

Google Docs does perhaps the best job at importing Office files

Microsoft Office might have been first default "office suite" in the enterprise, but it took Google to take it beyond desktops and into the cloud. G Suite—formerly Google Apps—started out as Writely, a simple online writing app from 2005. Google acquired it and piece by piece turned it into the cornerstone of today's best Microsoft Office competitor.

Need to gather data for your documents? Google Forms can do it right from your office suite.

G Suite's individual apps are great on their own—modern tools with everything you need to make documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. The individual features aren't the reason to use them, though.

What makes G Suite great is how it's built for collaboration. You can share your files with anyone—even publicly on the web if you like—and let them all jump in and help craft a masterpiece. You can live-edit with others at the same time or leave comments that Google will email for feedback later (even directly from the inbox—just reply to the email to reply to the document comment). Because it comes with any Google account—and who doesn't have a Gmail account?—G Suite is practically ubiquitous.

G Suite even includes tools to help you automatically learn from your data

It's getting smarter, too. The new Explore tool in Google Docs and Sheets can find insights from your data, creating charts from your spreadsheets and finding related documents automatically. It can even work while you sleep. Add a Google Form to your Google Sheets spreadsheet and new answers will show up in your sheet automatically, ready the next time you log in. Add some add-ons and integrations to your G Suite account, and your Sheets can crunch numbers on their own.

G Suite is best online. It does have mobile apps, though with far fewer features than the core web apps—you can't add suggested edits or most formatting to a document on mobile, for instance. And G Suite only works offline if you use it in Chrome. But if you mainly work from a computer and are online most of the day, G Suite is one of the best ways to collaborate on files online with your team or anyone who has a Gmail account.

G Suite Tools Included: Word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, notes, email, file sync
G Suite Sheets Spreadsheet Functions Supported: 351
G Suite Price: Free for personal use; from $5/month per user Basic plan for teams

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Google Docs review .

See integrations with all the G Suite apps on Zapier

Apple iWork (Web, Mac, iOS)

Best for making stylish files in minutes on an Apple device

It may not be the best at importing Microsoft Office files, but it is the best at quickly creating beautiful documents

Want to create beautiful documents, spreadsheets, and presentations? Apple iWork apps—Pages, Keynote, and Numbers—are the easiest way to make them, and they're free with Macs and iOS devices. You'll either find them preloaded on your new devices or in the App Store as a free download.

Each includes a number of templates to help you quickly make the files you want, in a simplified interface that hides most of its tools until you need them. You can start out with a template, pull in your own images and graphics, and end up with a print-quality file in minutes. Or, turn your document into a book—Pages lets you export a document as an ePub book that's perfect to publish to an eBook store.

Keynote is the app behind Steve Jobs' famous Apple product launches

Numbers is a unique take on a spreadsheet app, acting more like a document than the typical grid-filled sheet you'll find in Excel or Google Sheets. Crunch the numbers you need, then add text and charts around it in the blank document to build a full report around your core table.

Keynote, similarly, is great for more than just your standard slideshow. Its animations are so fluid, it's a popular tool for prototyping new apps and making short animated videos. Or, just use it to make your next meeting a bit more interesting—with the new Keynote Live, you can stream your presentation online right from Keynote.

iWork is best in its native apps on Mac and iOS, though you can also use it online from iCloud.com. That's a great way to share your files with colleagues who don't use iWork or to quickly tweak a presentation from a work computer when you forget your laptop.

Apple iWork Tools Included: Word processor, spreadsheet, presentations (notes, mail, and calendar apps also included with iOS and macOS)
Apple Numbers Spreadsheet Functions Supported: 266
Apple iWork Price: Free for Mac and iOS; free web app with an iCloud account, which comes free with any Apple device

Zoho Workplace (Web, Android, iOS)

Best for 30+ apps in one suite

Create documents in a new take on the traditional word processor

Zoho offers an incredible array of apps, but it all started with their online word processor, Zoho Writer. New apps joined the group year by year, eventually turning into Zoho Workplace—a full office suite online, with dozens of other Zoho apps that you can add on if needed.

Writer continues to be the leading app in the suite, with a new design that rethinks how a word processor should be designed. It keeps nearly all of its features hidden by default for a distraction-free interface. Need to tweak something? Open the left sidebar to find all of the tools a couple taps away in neatly organized toolbars. Bring in Microsoft Office files, and Zoho does an impressive job at retaining most of the original formatting.

Quickly grab the tool you need from the toolbar or menu

For everything else you need to do, there's a Zoho app to handle it. Its presentation and spreadsheet apps follow a more traditional style, with menus and toolbars mixed so you can work the way you want. And everywhere, collaboration is at the forefront. Each app includes a Zoho Chat box where you can talk to your colleagues and keep the conversation going no matter which Zoho app you're using.

When you need to turn your spreadsheets into an app, or find customer data for your report document, or find your company's finances for a presentation, that and more can be stored away in one of Zoho's many tools. That's the best reason to use this suite—it's all of the software your company needs, tied to an office suite that works from any browser. Plus, it's an affordable suite for small businesses.

Zoho Workplace Tools Included: Word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, email, team chat, file sync, websites (with 25+ other Zoho apps available)
Zoho Sheet Spreadsheet Functions Supported: 362
Zoho Workplace Price: Free for 25 users with 5GB storage; $3/month per user Standard plan for unlimited users and 30GB storage

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Zoho Mail review .

See Zoho app integrations on Zapier

Quip (iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, Web)

Best for a new, paper-free approach to office

Your documents don't stay the same forever, so Quip makes them act more like a wiki

Quip decided to rethink office software. The whole idea of documents is still rooted in paper—in most word processors, you work in a virtual sheet of A4 paper, even though you might not print the finished document. Quip does away with that skeuomorphism.

Just like a web page, your Quip documents go on forever with nary a page break or footer in sight. Write and organize your text with web-style headers. Use standard keyboard shortcuts to format your text—or hover over the left side of a paragraph to turn it into a quote, code block, header, or list. On the right, add new sections to your document—links to other documents, smart dates that remind you when they're due, and mentions to pull others into your document. They're living documents, smart pages with everything you're working on—stuff that could never fit on a printed sheet.

Mix simple spreadsheets into documents, see what changed over time, and chat with your team in one app

Need to crunch numbers? Just insert a spreadsheet block into your document for a smart table that supports standard spreadsheet functions. It's perhaps the easiest way to make a full report—you can write the document and find the data for the report all in one place.

Quip is best when shared with your team. It includes Slack-like team chat rooms where you can discuss ideas and share gifs with your colleagues. Each document has its own tiny chat in the sidebar, where you can track changes and chat with your team about the content.

It's far more basic than the other office suites. You can't select your own typeface or other formatting options—Quip instead includes a half-dozen document templates to style your document. And there's no presentation app, unlike other office suites. But it is a simpler way to put your data to work, without the legacy paper-style features most office suites are still built around.

Quip Tools Included: Word processor, spreadsheets, team chat
Quip Spreadsheet Functions Supported: 406
Quip Price: Free for personal use; $30/month Quip plan for 5 users, plus $12/month per additional user

For a deeper look at features and pricing, see our Quip review .

See Quip integrations on Zapier

LibreOffice (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android)

Best for a free desktop office suite

LibreOffice won't win any beauty contests, but it does do the basics for free

The latest version of the storied Microsoft Office competitor OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice is perhaps the best-known free office suite. If you didn't want to spend $100+ on a copy of Microsoft Office, for years it was your only good option. And today, if you want a free office suite on a PC that works without an internet connection, it's still one of the best options.

LibreOffice isn't fancy. It still feels like an older version of Microsoft Office, with endless toolbars and sidebars and buttons, some of which do the same functions as others. It's perhaps the least reliable at making documents look exactly like they would in Office (aside from Quip, but then, Quip has other goals in mind).

But it does work—especially for making new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It might take a bit more work to get things to look the way you want, but you can hide any extraneous toolbars or sidebars for just enough customization to fit your workflow. And while it's a bit slow to load and scroll through long documents, you can pinch to zoom, drag-and-drop files, embed files from one app of the suite into another, and everything else you'd expect in a desktop office suite. You can collaborate with document revisions and comments, only you'll need to sync the files on your own via Dropbox or another file sync app—and there's no way to live-edit files together with your team.

Perhaps LibreOffice's best feature is its Base app. This database editor lets you quickly build a form-based interface for new databases or use existing MySQL and other standard databases to build simple apps without coding. It's one of the few alternatives to Microsoft Access. It's also a great way to build simple in-house desktop tools for your team, then scale them up later into standalone apps if you want.

LibreOffice Tools Included: Word processor, spreadsheets, presentations, database builder, drawing tool
LibreOffice Calc Spreadsheet Functions Supported: 385
LibreOffice Price: Free, open-source

What's the Best Office Suite for You?

Work offline on a Mac or PC? Microsoft Office, iWork, and LibreOffice are the best options if you prefer to work from native apps installed on your computer. They include the most features, will make the nicest looking documents, and are designed to work great even without an internet connection. LibreOffice might not feel as polished as the other two suites, but it is free, includes a database app, and is still a great option especially on PCs (as Macs come with iWork for free). Quip and G Suite in Google Chrome can work well offline (with Quip's apps and G Suite's Chrome extensions), though you'll find them frustrating if you need to primarily work offline as their best collaboration features only work with an internet connection.

Work from a phone or tablet? Microsoft Office and iWork are again great options, as their mobile apps include nearly as many features as their desktop software. Quip, though, could be the best option for mobile office work, as its simpler take on documents works even better on mobile and all of its apps include the exact same features. G Suite and Zoho offer mobile apps that work well, though both include far fewer features than their web app counterparts.

Work with a team online? G Suite, Zoho, and Quip are the best options for working from a browser. They're each designed for collaboration first, built for teams to work together online. Microsoft Office 365 then is a great option for working directly from apps or online with Office Online. You can start a document in Word on your PC, have a colleague edit it from Word Online in their browser, and then finish up in Word on your iPad for collaboration from any device.

Don't want to pay for an office suite? Zoho and LibreOffice are the best options. Zoho's free for 25 users, meaning you can easily use it for even mid-sized work teams without paying—and LibreOffice is free for everyone, albeit without online collaboration tools. G Suite is another great option—as long as your team uses personal @gmail.com accounts, you can collaborate with as many people as you want for free. That same trick works with Microsoft Office, too—use free @outlook.com personal accounts, and you can collaborate in Office Online for free. And if you have a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, iWork is hard to pass up as it comes free with your device.

Microsoft Office isn't the only office suite today—but its new Office 365 plans are a great value, and its apps are still the most full-featured office tools. Apple's iWork apps help you easily create beautiful documents and presentations, while G Suite and Zoho both offer surprisingly full-featured tools from your browser. LibreOffice still offers a great set of tools for the low price of free. And Quip makes it so easy to create documents and spreadsheets, you'll wonder why you used to spend so much time tweaking fonts and footers.

One might not be the best for you. In fact, the best option is often to use the best features from multiple tools. On the Zapier team, we collaborate on documents and spreadsheets in G Suite, use Quip for shared internal notes as a wiki of sorts, and still keep Microsoft Office and iWork around when we need more robust features or template options.

Which works best for you? We'd love to hear which office suite you rely on—and why—in the comments below.

Find Alternate Apps for Your Needs

Don't want a full office suite? Perhaps you'd like a new way to make presentations, a less distracting writing app, or a spreadsheet tool that's not so complicated.

These are the apps for you, with more details on the apps in these office suites along with newer tools to make the files you want:

Header photo via Pexels.

The Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Excel Online

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Tue, 30 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

Excel is synonymous with spreadsheets, and for good reason. Decades after its introduction on the original Macintosh, Excel continues to be the most powerful spreadsheet app. It's not just a desktop app anymore, either. Today, you can use Excel on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and even the web.

That latter version is perhaps the most interesting. Microsoft Excel Online is a free, online version of Excel that includes the functions, chart tools, and more that you'd expect from a spreadsheet. Similar to Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel Online lets you collaborate with others in real-time, gather answers in an online survey, and crunch numbers with Excel functions. Most importantly, though, Excel Online now lets you connect your spreadsheet with other web apps to gather data and start automated workflows—and since it syncs with traditional Microsoft Excel, you can use the Online version to add automations to any spreadsheet.

If you've used Excel for years, switching to a web app may sound scary. Don't worry. In this guide, we'll walk you through everything you need to get your spreadsheets in the cloud, so you can gather data and collaborate—and still use Excel on your desktop.

Microsoft Excel Online Basics
Gather Data with an Excel Survey
Share and Collaborate in Microsoft Excel Online
Move Older Excel Files to the Cloud
Extend Microsoft Excel with Add-ins and Integrations

What is Microsoft Excel Online?

Microsoft Office Online gives you free, collaborative versions of Word, Excel, and more in the cloud

Microsoft Excel Online—along with the rest of Microsoft's Office Online apps—are a new take on the traditional Office suite you've used for years. Typically, you'd buy a copy of Office for a few hundred dollars and install it on your computer. That's how Office has been sold for years, starting with the first version of Excel for Macintosh in 1986. Microsoft Office is so ubiquitous, its bundled apps including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are synonymous with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations—they're the standard business apps across most industries.

Microsoft Excel Online is the free version of Excel that works in your browser. It's a companion app to Excel, designed to let you view and edit your Excel spreadsheets online. And yet, it's still a full spreadsheet app that supports nearly every Excel function and includes charting and survey tools to help you gather and visualize data. It's better than Google Sheets for working with existing Excel files or sharing spreadsheets with other Excel users, and at the low cost of free, is the cheapest way to use Excel.

You can use all of Excel Online's features for free, as long as you don't have more than 5GB of files in OneDrive, Microsoft's online file storage. Or, if you still want a copy of Office installed on your computer as well, the best option today is subscribing to Office 365, which gives you the most recent versions of Office for your computer along with file sharing in OneDrive. You can store all of your files in OneDrive, then edit any of the Office files online with Office Online. And—with the Business versions of Office 365, for now—you can use Microsoft Excel Online integrations to connect your spreadsheets to your favorite apps.

Here are the Office 365 options you can choose from:

Office Online - Free: With a Microsoft account, you can use Office Online and save up to 5GB of files in OneDrive for free.
Office 365 Personal - $6.99/month: Get Office apps on your computer, and 1TB of OneDrive storage.
Office 365 Home - $9.99/month: Get Office apps for 5 people in your family, along with 1TB of OneDrive for each user.
Office 365 Business - $8.25/month: Get Office on your work computer, with 1TB OneDrive for Business storage with professional integrations.
Office 365 Business Premium - $12.50/month: Get Office on your work computer and 1TB OneDrive for Business storage, along with email and video conferencing.

No matter which account you have, you can use the all of Office Online—including Excel Online. So let's dive in.

Excel Online Basics

Just like Excel on your desktop, Excel Online starts out with templates and recent files

There are two easy ways to open Microsoft Excel Online: Go to products.office.com/office-online and click the Excel link to create a new spreadsheet, or open OneDrive and click on a spreadsheet you've saved online (we'll look at how to move your spreadsheets to OneDrive later on).

If you open Excel Online from Office.com, you'll see a variety of templates to start a new spreadsheet, along with a list of recently opened sheets on the left side. Click a template or the blank spreadsheet option to start making a new spreadsheet.

The online viewer is a quick way to copy data from a spreadsheet

Alternately, if you open a spreadsheet from OneDrive or the Recent list, Excel will open it in an online viewer first. Click the Edit Workbook button then select Edit in Browser to open the spreadsheet in Excel Online. If you have Excel installed on your computer, you can select Edit in Excel to open the spreadsheet in traditional Excel and save the changes back to the web when you're done if you'd like, instead.

Excel Online includes the core Excel features—even the status bar for quick sums and averages

Microsoft Excel Online looks much like you'd expect. Your data is organized in rows and columns, with tools and features included in an Office ribbon toolbar. On the bottom right, the standard Excel status bar is included, with quick sums and averages of the cells you've selected.

Just click in a cell and type to start adding data to your spreadsheet. Or, paste in data from your computer or other spreadsheets, with the standard options to paste the formulas, values, or formatting.

To change the formatting, just click the toolbar buttons at top. You can tweak fonts, colors, text alignment, and number formats, or choose to wrap text and merge cells. Right-click to insert rows—or click the Insert button at the top for more detailed options. There's also Sort and Find tools to keep your data organized.

A search box to find the tools you need

You should be able to find the tools you need quickly just by looking through the toolbars. Or, just click the search box at the top and start typing—Excel Online includes a handy tool to help you find the tool you need with search. That's also where you'll find Excel's documentation to help you learn how to use each tool.

Functions

Excel Online includes nearly all default Excel functions

There is one spot where Excel Online is full featured: Functions.

Excel 2016 includes 471 functions, including 11 new ones just added to this version (along with 51 functions added in 2013, and 57 added in 2010)—and they're all included in the Excel Web App.

There are only 411 functions listed in the Excel Web App's Functions menu, but it actually supports all but 3 built-in Excel functions: SQL.REQUEST, JIS, and EUROCONVERT. Everything else is supported; even if the function isn't shown in the auto-complete dropdown, it'll still work once you enter it correctly.

To add a function, just type = followed by your function name. Excel will auto-complete the function name—press the Tab key to accept the suggested function—and then give you tips on what data you should include in the function. Or, you can look through the included functions by clicking the fx button right under the toolbar.

You can click cells to add them to your function, just as in other versions of Excel. And, once you've added a function to a cell, just select it and drag down to add the function to all of the other cells you've selected.

Quickly find sums and more with AutoSum

For a quicker way to add functions, just click the down arrow beside the AutoSum button to sum, average, count, or find the max/min numbers in a range. If you only need to glance at the data, just select a range of numbers and the bottom right toolbar will show you the sum, average, and count automatically.

Charts

Excel Online includes most of Excel's chart features

Once you've added data to your spreadsheet and have crunched your numbers with functions, it's time to bring it to life with charts. Excel Online includes a wide range of charts—and most of the tools you need to customize their appearance.

Just select the data you want to visualize, then click the Insert menu and select one of the chart styles you'd like. Excel will automatically generate the chart—and if you don't like it, just click any of the other chart types in the new Chart tab.

You can edit chart titles, legends, and labels in Excel Online

Then, you can customize your chart's title, legends, and labels. Just select the menu option for the item you want, and you can both add text and customize where it's displayed.

Unfortunately, there are no theme or color options for charts in Excel Online. If you want something different from the default colors, start your spreadsheet using one of the built-in Excel templates, and your charts will pick up the colors from that template. Alternatively, open your spreadsheet in Excel on your computer to change the design—then save it, and the changes will show up in Excel Online, too.

Tables

Tables let you sort and filter data easily in spreadsheets

Or, perhaps you just need an easier way to sort through data. For that, Excel's Tables are the tool you need.

Select the data you want to sort through, and click the Format as Table button in the Home toolbar. You can then sort each column, filter for specific items (say, all items that include the text "tool"), or use number filters to find items that equal or are greater than/less than, above or below average, or the top 10 items in that column. Or, you can add custom filters to find exactly the data you want.

Gather Data with an Excel Survey

With your spreadsheets online, Excel can work in the background even when your computer is turned off. One of the handiest ways to use that is with Excel Online's built-in Surveys tool. It's one Excel feature you won't find in the other versions of Excel.

Just open a spreadsheet in Excel Online, click the Survey button in the Home tab, then select New Survey.

The simple survey editor in Excel

That opens an editor pop-over, where you can add a title and description to your form or survey, along with your survey questions. Excel Surveys includes text, paragraph text, number, date, time, yes/no, and multiple choice questions. Just add your question and an optional subtitle, along with choices if you selected that question type. Then, choose whether the question is required, and optionally provide a default answer.

The Excel survey your respondents will see

Then, click the Share Survey button to copy a link to your survey. You can share that link privately in emails, or share it publicly to get a wider range of answers. Excel will automatically save your survey responses to a new sheet in your spreadsheet, with table formatting so you can easily sort through and filter your survey responses.

Share and Collaborate in Microsoft Excel Online

Share your spreadsheet to collaborate with others

Need to crunch numbers as a team? Just click the big Share button in the top right corner of Excel Online to get started. You can share the spreadsheet via email, sending a message along with a private link to your colleagues. Or, you can get a view or edit link to share directly. Anyone with the link can view or edit your spreadsheet, depending on the link you chose.

Office 365 for Business offers more detailed sharing options

If you have an Office 365 Business account, Excel offers more granular sharing options. You can restrict your file to only people in your company, or make it view-only. You can also add a link expiration date so it's not shared forever, or copy a QR code that your collaborators can scan to work with you.

Work on your spreadsheet together in real-time in Excel Online

Once your colleagues have opened your spreadsheet, everyone can work on it together inside Excel Online—though you can't open the file in traditional Excel apps at the same time. You'll see a list of the names of collaborators in the top right along with the cell they're currently editing. As changes are made, you'll see cells currently being edited shaded in that users' color, and cells selected by another user highlighted with their color.

Add Comments to Your Spreadsheet

To work together a bit better, click the Review tab to open Excel's comment tools. You can add a comment to a cell, show or hide the comments sidebar, or edit and delete any comments already on the spreadsheet. You can't add a second comment to a cell that already has a comment, and can't reply to comments, so you might need to work a bit to find a system that works well for your team. It's a good way to let others know where you left off work—or to identify cells that need changed—at least.

Share a Copy of Your Spreadsheet

You can download your spreadsheets in Excel or Open Document formats

Want to share your spreadsheet with others offline so they can edit it in a traditional copy of Excel? You could either copy the spreadsheet from your OneDrive folder, or you can download a new copy from the web.

Just click the File menu in Excel Online, select Save As, then choose Download a Copy to download a .xlsx formatted copy of your spreadsheet. Alternatively, you can download an OpenDocument formatted .ods spreadsheet to use in alternative spreadsheet tools like OpenOffice and LibreOffice.

Moving Your Existing Spreadsheets to Excel Online

OneDrive syncs your files so you can view them anywhere

If you're already an Excel user, you'll likely want to move your existing spreadsheets to the web so you can view and edit them in Excel online. There are two ways to do that. You could open OneDrive.com, and drag-and-drop your Excel spreadsheets to save them online.

The best option, though, is to install the OneDrive apps, and sync your spreadsheets to the cloud. You can then edit them either with Excel on your computer or online with Excel Online, and have the changes saved to both places automatically.

To do that, just download the OneDrive app and install it, then log in with your Microsoft account. If you have multiple accounts—say a OneDrive for Business account for work and a free account for personal files—you can sync both of them at the same time. Then, copy your Excel files to the new OneDrive folder to sync them with Excel Online.

Browse, organize, and view your files online

You can then open OneDrive online and see all of your synced files, organized into folders just like on your computer. And if you're ready to edit one, just click it to open it in Excel Online.

Any changes you make to the spreadsheet online will be saved back to your computer automatically. And if you make any new spreadsheets online, they'll also be saved to your computer in standard .xlsx format that you can open in any modern version of Excel. That's one of the best features of Excel Online: it saves your data in real files, so your spreadsheets aren't trapped in the cloud.

Opening Older Spreadsheets in Excel Online

One thing to note: Excel Online can only open .xlsx and .xlsm files, and with the latter it won't be able to run any macros included in the workbook. If you upload an older .xls file, or a .csv spreadsheet to OneDrive and then try to open it online, Excel will just download the file to your computer instead of opening it.

As such, you'll first need to convert any spreadsheets you want to use online to the newer .xlsx format. Just open them in Excel, open the Save as… dialog from the File tab or menu, then select Excel Workbook (.xlsx). You can then add those files to OneDrive to view and edit them online.

You can only open spreadsheets smaller than 10MB

Excel Online also can't open files larger than 10MB. That should be fine for most spreadsheets.

There is a workaround, though, if you have larger sheets. Just signup for Power BI, Microsoft's data analyzation tool, which offers a free 1GB account to get started. Then, you can add your larger spreadsheets (up to 250MB each) to Power BI, and open them in Excel Online.

Extend Microsoft Excel with Add-ins and Integrations

Add extra features to Excel with Add-ins

Microsoft Excel Online may have as many functions as traditional Excel, but it doesn't include anywhere near as many features. You can fix that to a degree with Office Add-ins.

From the Office Add-Ins Store, you can find a wide variety of free and paid tools for Excel. Incredibly, the same add-ins designed for Excel 2016 run in Excel Online, so you can use many of the same powerful tools that would otherwise require desktop Excel.

To add an add-in to your Microsoft Excel Online spreadsheet, click the Insert menu in Excel Online and select Office Add-ins to browse the store right inside your spreadsheets. Once you've found an add-in you want to use, just click the Add button to install it—and occasionally you'll then need to click a Start button to enable the add-in.

Ablebits' Trim Spaces Add-in removes extra spaces from your spreadsheet

You'll then see your add-ins from the sidebar along with any comments you've added to your documents. When you re-open this spreadsheet, those same add-ins should open in the sidebar again. If you don't see them, just open the Add-ins Store again, add the same add-in to your spreadsheet, and the sidebar will appear with any add-ins you've enabled.

There are a number of great add-ins, many of which connect to web apps and let your spreadsheets create invoices, manage projects, and more. Some of the most handy are those that add extra features to Excel, or replace built-in features you'd find in Excel 2016. Here are some of the best to try:

Advanced Find and Replace to search deeply through your spreadsheets
Duplicate Remover to remove duplicate data
Split Text to Columns to make your data easier to use in a spreadsheet
Trim Spaces to remove extra blank spaces from your spreadsheets
Compare Text to find differences between text
Merge Cells to merge rows, columns, or entire ranges
Solver to solve optimization problems for statistics
Bing Maps to create maps from your spreadsheet data
Blockspring to add extra data analysis functions to Excel

There is one thing you can't run in Excel Online: macros. Macros let you automate Excel, either by letting Excel record what you do in a spreadsheet or by writing simple code. For that, you'll need a traditional copy of Excel installed on your computer. Then, you can write your own Excel macros to make powerful spreadsheets, and sync them with OneDrive to still be able to view and edit their info online.

Connect Excel to 700+ Apps with Zapier Integrations

Another great way to do more with Excel Online is with Excel integrations using app automation tool Zapier. Zapier can watch your spreadsheet for new or updated rows, and then start workflows with over 600 other apps based on that data from your spreadsheet. Or, it can search through your spreadsheet, add a new row, or even update existing rows in your spreadsheets.

Say you want to keep track of how many tasks your team finishes in Trello. You'd just make a Zap with the Trello integration, and have Zapier watch for cards that are archived in Trello.

Then, you'd add an Excel action step to the Zap, and have Zapier add a new row to your spreadsheet. Connect your Office 365 account to Zapier, then select the correct spreadsheet and worksheet where you'd like to store your data.

Now all you have to do is click the + icon beside each of the column names from Excel, and select the correct data from Trello to add to the spreadsheet. Once everything's customized the way you want, test and turn the Zap on, and Zapier will automatically log all archived tasks to your spreadsheet.

There are dozens of ways you can use integrations like these to save data to your Excel spreadsheet automatically and get work done right from your spreadsheet. Here are some of the most popular integrations—or check out Zapier's Excel integrations for more ideas and ways to connect your favorite apps.

Microsoft Excel Online may be designed as a sidekick to traditional Excel, but it's a powerful tool it its own right. You can create spreadsheets, crunch numbers, collaborate and more right from your browser for free. And with add-ons and integrations, you can add any extra features you want to your spreadsheet.

It's the perfect way to use Excel anywhere—and may be the best way to get started with Excel if you don't already have a copy installed.

Learn More About Spreadsheets with Zapier

Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful tools, no matter which app you create them in. They can manage your finances and mailing lists—or they can turn your website's analytics data and let you build your own custom apps.

In our new Ultimate Guide To Google Sheets book, you'll find a number of tutorials on how to get more out of spreadsheets. And don't worry: the same tutorials will work in Excel Online with only minor differences.

Here are some of the best tutorials to help you get started:

If you're just getting started with spreadsheets, check out The Beginner's Guide to Spreadsheets
Want to manage contacts in a spreadsheet? Here's how to build a spreadsheet CRM
Spreadsheets can help you write faster, too. Here's how to outline, organize notes, create HTML, and more in spreadsheets
Then, create a business dashboard in a spreadsheet, and to make it work in Excel, just use the Keluro Web Analytics add-on to get Google Analytics data in your spreadsheet

Or, you can download a copy to learn more about spreadsheets on your own anytime.

Excel for Macintosh ca. 1986 photo by Microsoft Sweeden via Flickr

Slack Without Slacking: How to Automatically Update Your Slack Status

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Mon, 29 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

It's 5AM, and your colleague in Boston is wondering why you're not responding to their Slack messages, as your current timezone slipped their mind. You're sleeping, another colleague is on vacation, and the team lead in Sydney is having dinner. If only they knew to ask Beth in NYC instead.

Global teams mean someone's working at any given minute—but it also means someone's also offline, too. Small teams can easily remember varying schedules and timezones, but as teams grow you need a better way to know what everyone's doing.

AOL Instant Messenger solved this years ago with status messages, the early foreshadowings of Facebook and Twitter's endless feeds. Status messages were an easy way to let people know why you weren't responsive—that you weren't avoiding them, you were just out to lunch.

That feature is the newest thing in Slack, the popular team chat tool—this time powered by emoji. Instead of your colleague wondering why you're not online, they'll see a bed emoji and your status of zzz, and wait until later to get in touch.

Here's how to get the most out of Slack status updates, with automations that will help you keep your team up to date, even when you're in a rush.

How to Set Your Slack Status

HEY! You can now set your status to share what you’re up to, where you’re off to, or… whatever, really. https://t.co/hxKlRkAhdA #changelog pic.twitter.com/1jY6Fnr3AX
— Slack (@SlackHQ) April 13, 2017

You know how your phone includes pre-written SMS messages to send if you can't answer a call, like On my way and Sorry, I can't talk right now? Slack does the same with its status updates.

To set your Slack status, just open Slack, tap your name in the top left corner, hover over Edit status, then select one of the 5 suggested status updates. They cover the basics of In a meeting and Out sick with an accompanying emoji.

Or, set your own status. Type in what you're doing (in up to 100 characters—just shy of a Tweet) and select an emoji that fits.

Wondering what someone's up to? Hover over their emoji.

That emoji will now show up beside your name in Slack. Your colleagues can hover over it to see your status. Or, if they search for your name in Slack, they'll see the emoji and status—which just might keep them from messaging you if your status is Vacation or zzzzz.

On a call? Slack will let your team know.

Slack will keep that same status on your account until you change it—except for one time. By default, it'll change your status to On a call if you're on a Slack call, and then will switch back to your normal status afterward. If you don't want Slack to change your status, you can turn this feature off from Slack's Advanced preferences.

How to Automatically Set Your Slack Status

What about when a client calls in Skype, or you're meeting a customer across town? And how about your vacation and out of office status updates?

Your calls aren't all in Slack—but you can still automatically set your Slack status if you want. All you need to do is connect your calendar, to-do list, and other tools to Slack with Zapier. With 700+ app integrations and a new Slack Set Status action, Zapier can handle your Slack status for you.

Let's build a simple Zap that updates your Slack status when you're in a meeting—and then look at some advanced ways to automate your Slack status.

Set Your Slack Status to Your Calendar Event

Zapier can watch Google Calendar for upcoming events

Your calendar is perhaps the best indicator of what you're currently doing, with your appointments, vacation days, meetings, and more scheduled in one place. That makes it the perfect thing to power your Slack status.

All you need is a Zap that watches your calendar for new events, and changes your Slack status accordingly.

Just open Zapier, select Make a Zap, then select Google Calendar as the trigger app. Use the Event Start trigger, which lets Zapier watch for events right before they start.

Select the calendar Zapier will watch. You can use different calendars as an easy way to customize your Slack status—set your meetings in one calendar, your vacation days in another, and so on. Or, put everything in one calendar, then add a keyword to the Search Term field to watch for specific events (aka have Zapier search your calendar for events with the word Vacation).

Choose how long before the meeting you want to change your status—you might want to set your status to Vacation 8 hours before the vacation actually starts at midnight, while you likely only need to switch your status for calls 5 minutes before they start.

Make your event name your Slack status—or add a custom status

Next, add a Slack step to your Zap. Click the show less common options link at the bottom of the list, then choose the Set Status option.

Now for the fun part. You can type in a new status that fits this type of event—perhaps just On a call for your meetings, or On vacation for your out of office events. Or, tap the + button on the right and select your event summary to use that as your Slack status.

Find the Slack emoji name from the emoji box in Slack

You'll also need to add an emoji to your status—and will need to type it in as a Slack-style emoji such as :simple_smile: or :palm_tree:. To find the emoji you want, open the emoji box in Slack, search for the emoji you want, and note its name from the bottom of the box. Then type that emoji name in your Zap.

Test and turn on your Zap, and now every time you have a new event in that calendar, your Slack status will change accordingly. You can add as many Zaps as you want to your different calendars, to make sure your status is always correct.

Clear Your Slack Status Automatically

Get Zapier to wait until your meeting is over—and then change your Slack status back automatically

Want to set your status back to something generic when you're back from your meeting? Zapier can do that too. You'll just need to add two additional steps to your Zap.

First, add a Delay step, select Delay Until, then tap the + icon and select the Event Ends time from your calendar.

Then add another Slack Set Status step, with a new status and emoji letting people know you're back at work or off your call.

Need help setting this up? Here's a pre-made Zap that will watch your Google Calendar for events, set your Slack status accordingly, then change it back once the event's over:

Set Your Slack Status Every Morning and Evening

Zapier can set your Slack status every day, automatically

Keep the same schedule every day? Zapier can keep your Slack status up-to-date automatically with a Schedule Zap. Just start your Zap out with a Schedule trigger, have it run every day, and set the time you start work. You can even choose to not have it run on weekends.

Then, add a Slack Set Status action, and fill in your normal working status. Make another Schedule Zap that runs every evening, and have it set your status as out off office, too.

Switch Your Slack Status With a Click

Set your Slack status right from Google Chrome

Want a simple way to set your Slack status without having to open Slack? The Zapier Chrome extension is just what you need.

Install it, then make a new Zap with the Push trigger. You can use the default push trigger where you only have to click the button—or you can use Push with Text to type in a custom status.

Add a Slack Set Status action with the emoji and text you want, or use the text from the Chrome extension if you want. Next time you're out of office—or working on any project in Chrome—just tap the button in Chrome and Zapier will update your status for you.

Want to simplify it even more? Zapier partnership lead Ze Proença has his Push with Text Zap watch for the words on and off, and sets his status accordingly: Courting partners for on, and Lounging for off. That lets him type something short that adds the full Slack status he wants.

Away from your computer? You can use Zapier's SMS integration instead. Just send a message to your Twilio phone number, and it'll update your Slack status with whatever is in your text.

Use Twitter to let people know what you're doing? Zapier could set your Slack status to your latest Tweet—and with a filter, it could watch for Tweets with specific hashtags and only use those to update your status.

Add random emoji to your Slack Status with Zapier's Formatter

Or, you can go even further. Say you want to tell your team when you're out for lunch, and perhaps use a fun emoji in your Status. That's what Zapier customer champion Paolo Papa does with his Push Zap. Whenever he pushes his Zap's button in Chrome, Zapier picks a random emoji and sets his status as Lunch.

To do that, just add a Formatter step to your Zap before the Slack step. Select Utilities, then choose Pick from list. In the Operation field, select Choose Random to have Zapier pick a random option from your list each day.

Then, add as many emoji as you want to the Input section. You'll then have a random emoji to use every time you update your Slack status.

Build a Slack Status Update Workflow

If a simple scheduled Slack status update isn't enough for you, and your calendar doesn't include everything you're doing, it's time to build a workflow that fits your process. Perhaps you want a way to let your team know what task you're working on. Just have Zapier watch your to-do list or project management app for new tasks in a list.

Then, when you're working on a task, move it to that list and Zapier will update your Slack status with that task. Check it off, and Zapier can update your status again.

Writing a new document, editing a blog post, gathering notes, or crunching numbers in a spreadsheet? Just have Zapier watch for a new file in a folder, then whenever you start working on something new Zapier can update your status with that file's name.

You don't want to get disturbed when you're trying to focus. Just use a timer app, and let Zapier set your Slack status when your focused work sessions start and end. Perhaps use a :no_entry_sign: emoji so people know not to bug you.

With RescueTime, you could even have Zapier update your Slack status if you're not being productive as a little thing to keep you motivated to work throughout the day.

Or, you can build a fancy workflow with multi-step Zaps. Zapier support engineer Fokke Zandbergen built a set of Zaps that check his calendar for his role that day and the current time in his location. The Zaps then set his Slack status according to a list of Slack statuses in the Zap. He even added a Push Zap so he can manually override his automated Slack status updates if he wants.

Think through your workflow and the apps you use every day, then build your own custom Slack status update workflow. Your colleagues will never have to ping you to ask what you're working on again.

Let Zapier Catch the Slack

You shouldn't have to remember to change your Slack status when you're on vacation or out with the flu or on the call with a client—but you should keep your team in the know. With a few automations, you can tap one button to update your status, or let your calendar and other tools do that for you.

Do More with Zapier + Slack

There are dozens of other ways to use Zapier and Slack together. Here are some resources to get started:

Learn how to build your own Slack bot to add tasks, lookup contact info, and anything else you want to do with your apps from Slack.
Find Slack taking more and more of your time? Here's 12 tips to Slack productively—with ways to clear out your sidebar, catch up on what happened when you're out, and more.
Jealous of everyone else's cool custom Slack emoji? Our Emoji Like a Pro guide will teach you where emoji come from, how to use them professionally, and ways to use them in Slack (hint: you can search by emoji for a simple way to tag messages).
Speaking of search, check out our Slack Hidden Search Features Guide to uncover any message you need in Slack, anytime you need it.

What to Do When You Can't Get Things Done

scott@mythermos.com (Scott Blitstein) — Fri, 26 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

Whether you carefully plan every task in a Getting Things Done list or scribble reminders to yourself on the back of an envelope, your goal is the same: You've got stuff that needs doing and you're trying to get yourself organized enough to do it. With a task management system that works for you, you'll get more done with less frustration, fewer missed deadlines, and greater overall work satisfaction. That's something you should rely upon.

But what do you do when your system fails, when your productivity falters, and you risk dropping the ball on important work? Don't panic. It's easier said than done, but panic won't help you feel better or get stuff finished.

Instead, it's time for a tune-up of your systems. Let's pop the hood, look at some of our most common productivity complaints about time, tasks, and tools, and see what can be done to get back on track.

Time

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

No productivity system, no shiny new app will ever give you more hours in the day. Time's the equalizer, the single factor that limits us all.

Don't expect the magical. Instead, figure out what time problem you're hoping a productivity method will help you solve—then fix that problem itself.

I Don't Have Enough Time to Do Everything

It's important to be realistic in determining what you can accomplish each day. Try to add an estimated duration for each task so you're not overextending yourself. You can even time yourself doing a task, and use that time to help schedule just how much you can do in a given time period.

Then, learn how to say no—or at least "not now"—to ensure you aren't taking on more than you can accomplish. As it turns out, you actually don't have enough time to do everything possible each day. By saying no, you free up time to prioritize your most important tasks and not waste time on the unessential.

I'm Not Getting Enough Done in a Day

You may be getting more done than you think. Take a few minutes at the end of your day to see what you have marked as completed or done. Or, use an app like RescueTime to track your workday, and see where every minute and hour goes.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what you've accomplished as you sprint through your day. When you view a list of completed items, you can appreciate your actual progress from each day—and you can inspire yourself to do more tomorrow.

I'm Always Busy Working, Shuffling Between Tasks

"There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once"- Lord Chesterfield

Ah, the "myth of multitasking." Turns out, it's not as productive as previously believed. While it seems like tackling numerous things at once is the height of productivity, it actually slows you down as you move from task to task and back. "People who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits," says Stanford psycology professor Clifford Nass. "They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking."

As Lord Chesterfield said, “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” The time you spend juggling multiple tasks is time you are not fully devoting yourself to any of those tasks. You'll get less done and make yourself worse at everything you're doing.

My Workflow Is Frequently Interrupted

Any time you are pulled away from your tasks, it takes time to readjust to them when you jump back in—up to 25 minutes in many cases. These interruptions could be tiny things: Loud noises, your phone ringing, someone knocking on your door, or anything else that breaks your concentration. They could be your own fault, when you switch to check email or Facebook during work. They're just enough to pull your focus away and make you have to start over on what you're working on.

It's not always feasible to have a quiet interruption-free workspace but it is helpful to have one, especially if your work requires deep concentration. And while the internet can help with your work, it's also the world's greatest distraction source one click away.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't take breaks throughout your day. In fact, breaks can be helpful. Consider using a timer to force yourself to take breaks and give yourself a few minutes to do these sorts of activities. Think of it as a carrot for your hard work. Or, use an app to hide distractions and stay focused. Think of it as a stick to keep you on the productive path.

Tasks

No, there's likely not enough time for just one more task.

An overflowing to-do list makes it difficult to decide where to focus your energy. It can be so intimidating that you don't end up getting anything done, and decide to browse the App Store for a better to-do list app instead.

Don't do that. Instead, manage your tasks in a way that helps you get things done.

I Don't Know Where to Start

When your schedule is bursting at the seams, it's critical to prioritize your tasks. Every task isn't equally important.

Take consequences into account when prioritizing your task lists. What has to get done, and what tasks are keeping a larger project from getting finished? Use your to-do list's priority tools—or perhaps highlight tasks in a paper list—to reflect the most important things to focus on.

"Worrying about everything we must get done is unproductive," says author Michael Hyatt. "It only creates anxiety. Yes, my workload looked impossible, but I didn’t dwell on that. Instead, I focused on next most important thing—and kept moving."

Once you've listed the things that must be done first, you'll know where to dive in.

I Can't Tell What I Should Focus on

"If you set a date that’s fake, you’ll know it’s fake and you’ll ignore it."- Michael Lineberger

Due dates automatically make things look important. But there's no need to put due dates on all to-dos. It seems like it might be a good idea to schedule everything, but it'll also make you prioritize things just because they have a due date.

"If you set a date that’s fake, you’ll know it’s fake and you’ll ignore it," says author Michael Linenberger. "In fact, you may miss some important deadlines because you’ll get in the habit of ignoring all due dates you write down."

If you are assigning "soft" or flexible due dates along with your firm due dates, it is easy to lose track of which items are actually due and those which are of the "would be nice to have done" variety. It's better instead to have a list of your less important tasks, and turn to those once the actually crucial due tasks are finished.

I'm Bogged Down With Tasks

It isn’t always necessary to break down a task into multiple steps—that's often what makes to-do lists look impossibly long. Sure, larger projects should be include tasks that are detailed enough to show individual steps, but finding that balance between too little information and too much information can be tricky. For the most part, individual tasks are just that, and don't need extra steps.

For example, you might have a task on your list to remind yourself to take out the garbage on Monday nights. That task is simple enough that you don’t need any additional steps to complete it successfully. It isn't necessary to specify that you need to unlock the back door and put on your shoes to know that you need to do those things first.

On the other hand, having tasks that are too vague can also be problematic. "If you find you’re not getting some of the things done on your to-do list, perhaps the problem is that the tasks are too big," says blogger Steph Caldwell. If the task has logical concrete steps that can be broken out of the larger task, creating subtasks is warranted. You're much more likely to attack a task called "vacuum the living room" than you would be when faced with one called "clean the house."

It Was Working Last Week…

Your task list isn't a set-it-and-forget-it prospect. Sure, you can put in repeating tasks list details for every project, but things will happen outside of your control. Projects can grow, shrink, or be postponed. Priorities change. Equipment fails, and the power sometimes goes out. It's important to reconcile these changes with your task list.

A periodic review can ensure that you are able to meet deadlines and focus your efforts on the appropriate tasks. Then, you can alleviate interruptions by having a contingency plan in place. Any tools needed for your daily work should be well-maintained and have a back up—even your to-do list. That will help you make sure you can keep getting things done.

Tools

You need a way to track your tasks—but the most important thing is doing the work.

With only a handful of tasks you may be able to just store them in your head, but that won't be sufficient when you have multiple projects running concurrently. Thus, the world of to-do list and project management apps.

Those open a new productivity rabbit hole: The quest for just the right software. That can itself become a distraction. You may think new software will be the holy grail, the system to end all other systems. Or perhaps if you tinker with it and try to squeeze out every bit of potential time savings possible, then you'll be productive.

When your system becomes your most prominent task, rather than the items you have entered into it, you've created a monster rather than an efficient workflow.

Something simple like tasks on a pad of paper that you can review frequently could work, as could a full-featured to-do list app or project management system. It doesn't have to be fancy, just functional for you.

Once you've picked a tool, here's how to solve the problems you're bound to encounter:

I Can't Make This Tool Work for Me

If you're experiencing difficulty with your task software, you may be using the wrong system for your work. Everyone works differently, and the productivity system for one person may be the wrong one for someone else.

Productivity systems range from simple lists to complex Gantt charts with every bit of your time divided up. Failure to match your task app to your working style can lead to much frustration and loss of productivity.

First, find the right style for your work. Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a common system to manage personal tasks—here's a guide on how to manage your tasks in GTD. For a simpler alternative, try a grocery list, spreadsheet, or string-around-the-finger productivity methods. Or, for more order for your team work, this project management systems guide will help you decide if traditional, agile, or other work styles are best for your team.

Then, put it to work. Any task tracking method or software is only good if you use it. Watch for problems you encounter. You can have a prime system and the best intentions but if your system causes friction in your workflow, you won't be as likely to use it. Remember, systems like this are supposed to make your life easier, your workflow more streamlined. Any time it fails to work this way means perhaps it's time to change productivity systems—and get an app to fit it.

I Can't Find My Tasks

At this point you might be saying, "Yes, I've done all of this and it's still not enough." Let's talk about working smarter.

Switching between to-do lists is just as bad as multitasking and switching between tasks. One to-do list app might not be enough—you might need one tool for team projects and another for your personal tasks. You could copy and paste tasks between apps, but don't do that either.

Instead, use automation tool Zapier to copy tasks from one app to another, making sure every task is in the right place. You can even automate your project management, using Zapier workflows to create new projects, assign work, remind you to followup on tasks, and more. That frees you up to focus on your work without worrying about finding the right task or remembering what to do.

"Worrying about everything we must get done is unproductive. It only creates anxiety."- Michael Hyatt

No matter what system you implement to keep your tasks (and you) on track, there will always be challenges to that ideal state of organizational nirvana.

It's important to carefully consider—and frequently reconsider—your needs and what's really keeping you from being productive. When challenges to productivity strike, remember there's more than one solution to help you regain control, and a new app is often not the solution.

Remain true to the way you work and vigilant about areas your workflow may be lacking. That's how you can once again get things done.

To-do list by Breakingpic Clock photo by Bob Clark; Tasks photo by Startup Stock Photos; Computer photo via Negative Space.

The 16 Best Email Apps to Manage Your Inbox

paula.a.dupont@gmail.com (Paula DuPont) — Thu, 25 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

Email is important. Your inbox is the one place where everything from receipts and newsletters to correspondence from colleagues and best friends comes together. Your email address itself regularly serves as your digital passport, too—it's how you login to most apps and sites.

It might not be the most important part of your day, but email has a way of making everything feel like a priority. Odds are you'll feel overwhelmed and unproductive when your inbox is a mess.

You need an email app that makes it easy to organize your messages, search through archives, and get to inbox zero. There are more email apps than ever—so we tried over thirty email services to see which ones work best. Here are the 15 best apps to manage your emails.

10 Best Email Apps
6 Best Email Services
Bonus: Automate Your Email Management

The Best Email Apps for Your Devices

Email apps are everywhere. Odds are, you already have a couple ready to use. Your email service—like Gmail or Outlook.com—includes an app to check email online, and your computer and phone likely include a built-in email app, often named Mail.

Those cover the basics. But the best email apps do far more. Some simplify things, helping you quickly clear out your inbox. Others bring together all the business productivity tools you need to get your work done, with powerful tools to sort messages, see details about a contact, schedule meetings, and archive emails offline. And all bring a new way to approach your email.

Here are the very best email apps you should try:

The Best Email Apps

App	Best for	Works on	Price
Outlook	email, calendars, tasks, and notes in one app	Android, iOS, Windows, Mac	$6.99+/mo.; free on mobile
Inbox by Gmail	turning your inbox into a to-do list	Android, iOS, Web	Free
Nylas Mail	making sure your emails get read	Windows, Mac, Linux	Free; $12/mo.
Mail.app	annotating images and signing documents in your inbox	iOS, Mac	Free
Airmail	a deeply customizable inbox	iOS, Mac	$9.99; $4.99
Spark	quick emoji-powered responses	iOS, Mac	Free
Newton	simple, text and voice powered email	Android, iOS, Windows, Mac	$49.99/yr
Postbox	powerful email organization	Windows, Mac	$40
Polymail	working on email with your team	iOS, Mac	Free; $13+/mo.
Unibox	chat-style contact focused emails	iOS, Mac	$15.99; $4.99

Outlook (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac)

for email, calendars, tasks, and notes in one app

If you've ever held an office job, you've probably already become acquainted with Outlook, Microsoft's premiere email application. It's not just for corporations anymore. Outlook's new mobile apps—based on the popular Accompli email app—and the redesigned Outlook for Windows and Mac in Office 365 are among the most powerful ways to manage your email from all of your devices.

Outlook gives you a productivity heads-up display. Here you'll find not just your email, but also your calendar, tasks, contacts, notes, and even RSS feeds all in a single interface. You can filter and search through everything together, to find a news update and a related email, then tie them together into a note that you add to next week's appointment on your calendar. It works great with Exchange and Office 365, the email services most common in enterprises, and integrates with Office apps, making it one of the best email apps for work.

Outlook Pricing: from $6.99/month with Office 365 Personal, or $119 for Outlook 2016 standalone; Free on iOS and Android

See Office 365 integrations and Microsoft Exchange integrations on Zapier

Inbox by Gmail (Android, iOS, Web)

for turning your inbox into a to-do list

Gmail's labels, search, and nearly limitless storage changed how we use email. The new Inbox by Gmail app is designed to do that all over again by automatically sorting your mail and turning each message into a to-do.

Inbox bundles your trips, purchase receipts, and promotions into groups so you can peek at them, keep your tickets and check-in info in your inbox throughout your trip, or archive them all in a tap. You can add your own bundles, to group work messages and more automatically. Then, read and reply to emails as normal—or archive them with the checkmark. You can pin important emails to the top of your inbox, snooze emails until you need to work on them, or make new tasks to manage right alongside your emails.

There's only one issue: Inbox only works with Gmail and G Suite accounts. But if you use Google's email services, Inbox is one of quickest ways to clear out your email.

Inbox by Gmail Pricing: Free with a Gmail account

See Gmail integrations on Zapier, which work with your emails in Inbox

Nylas Mail (Windows, Mac, Linux)

for making sure your emails get read

Ever wondered if your colleague actually read your email? Nylas Mail can help you find out. It tracks email opens and clicks on links in your emails, to make sure your recipient actually read everything you sent—and if they checked back on the email multiple times.

It makes sure you keep up with your messages, too, with a contacts sidebar that can pull in details from social networks and Salesforce, built-in translation so you can read everyone's messages, and a snooze tool to remind you about emails again later. Its quick reply templates will help you write back quicker—and its undo send tool will keep you safe even if you accidentally hit Send too soon. Plus, Nylas includes themes to make your inbox look like Gmail, Slack, or any other app you love for a consistent experience.

Nylas Mail Pricing: Free; $12/month Nylas Pro for unlimited send later, snoozed messages, and integrations with Salesforce and more

Apple Mail (iOS, Mac)

for annotating images and signing documents in your inbox

The Mail app built into your Mac and iPhone—popularly referred to as Mail.app—may seem like a basic email tool, but its simplicity belies the powerful tools under the hood. With its Markup tools, you can add annotations to images and sign documents right from your Mail inbox. You can also use iCloud Mail's Mail Drop feature in all of your email inboxes, to can send as large of attachments as you want without taking up your inbox storage space.

Mail is a bit more basic on your iPhone and iPad, but it does let you swipe an email to delete or move it to a folder, and can search through your entire email inboxes on the go. On the Mac, Mail's filters and Smart Inboxes help organize your inbox automatically—and for everything else, you can install extensions or build Automator workflows to add the features you need to manage your mail.

Apple Mail Pricing: Free with iOS and macOS

Airmail (iOS, Mac)

for a deeply customizable inbox

Sparrow was the email app that made email fun again—until it was bought by Google and shut down. The next best thing is Airmail. It started out as a simple email app, one that could show just a list of your emails like Sparrow. Over time, Airmail's team has added so many features that today it's one of the most powerful, customizable email apps available.

Its customizable notifications let you only get notified when emails from your most important contacts come in—or you can let Airmail watch who you email most often, and notify you about emails from those people automatically. It lets you swipe emails to file them like Apple Mail—only here, you can set what happens when you swipe messages. It can help you write faster, with built-in templates for your most-used emails. And, it works with your favorite apps, with built-in integrations with Fantastical, Evernote, OmniFocus, Dropbox, and more, so you can turn emails into tasks and share files from your favorite tools.

Or, you can hide it all and just get a Twitter-style stream of your emails with the inbox theme you want. It's an email app that's as powerful or simple as you want.

Airmail Pricing: $9.99 for macOS; $4.99 for iOS

Spark (iOS, Mac)

for quick emoji-powered replies

Every email doesn't need a full reply; sometimes a thumbs-up or Ok! is all you need. So, in Spark, that's all you have to send. Tap Quick Reply, then send an instant response with an emoji and archive the message in one step. Appointments are even better—instead of a standard calendar invite email, Spark will show you a preview of the event in your calendar with Accept and Reject buttons. Tap Approve to add the event to your calendar, let your contact know you're coming, and archive the email all at once.

Spark includes Gmail Inbox-style message groups so you can figure out what needs your attention and what should be swiped away. It can snooze messages, save them to Evernote or Pocket to read later, or clear away messages that aren't important. And when you do need to send a full email, just swipe over your signature to quickly switch to the one that's best for this message.

Spark Pricing: Free

Newton (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac)

for simple, text and voice powered email

Newton—formerly called CloudMagic—includes all the fancy features the best mail apps today offer. Snoozed messages, scheduled sending, details about your contacts, app integrations, and notifications when your emails have been read will all keep your inbox focused. The best thing about Newton, though, is that you won't think about its features most of the time.

Instead, you'll quickly read through your emails with a Gmail-like list of messages that open into a full-window reading and writing view so you can take your time and craft the perfect reply. Or, you can go through your emails even easier, perhaps while making your morning coffee, with Newton's Alexa skill. Say Alexa, ask Newton who just mailed me, and Alexa can read you the email, archive or snooze it, then move on to the next email in your inbox.

Newton Pricing: $49.99 per year for all apps

Postbox (Windows, Mac)

for powerful email organization

After starting out as an updated version of Thunderbird, the open-source email app from the team behind Firefox, Postbox has grown into a powerful email app that manages to make desktop email feel a bit more like working in a browser. You can open multiple emails in tabs, organize messages with tags (in addition to standard folders), jump to your most-used folders from the Favorites bar, and share files using file sync tools like Dropbox and Box.

Quickly dig into your email threads with its detailed contact info sidebar and an attachments view that shows every file you've received via email. Reply faster with templates, and a Quick Post tool to forward emails to Zapier's email automation workflows. And if you need more tools, Postbox addons let write in Markdown, import messages, encrypt emails, and more.

Postbox Pricing: $40 lifetime license

Polymail (iOS, Mac—Windows and Android coming soon)

for working on email with your team

Polymail's core features feel like a mix between Spark and Nylas, with scheduled messages and read notifications in a simplified interface that makes browsing through your mail simple. It can even watch every single thing that happens with your emails, to know when each recipient opens your messages and who downloads your attachments—and it can do that with bulk emails for a quick mail merge option without needing a newsletter app. Booking a meeting? Polymail makes scheduling simple by showing you who's available, when, right inside your email editor.

Its best feature, though, is that you can use all of that with your team. Create email templates, and everyone can share them instead of having to make their own. You can track stats together to see how long your whole team is spending in their inboxes—and how likely each person is to get a reply.

Polymail Pricing: Free for core features; from $13/month Pro plan for per-recipient email tracking and 5 email campaigns per month, and $16/month per user for Team plans

Unibox (iOS, Mac)

for chat-style contact focused email

Email is too complicated for short messages. Sometimes you just need to send a quick message to a friend, and a subject and signature seem like way too much. And if you want to know what you'd said to that person last time, you'd have to search through your email archives.

Unibox changes all that, grouping your emails by contact. Instead of a list of unread emails, you'll see your contacts sorted by who's emailed most recently. Tap a contact to see every email you've sent back and forth in a chat-style conversation view, then quickly reply from the top of your conversation list.

There's nothing to organize, no pressure to hit Inbox Zero. All you'll have to do is see is who's gotten in touch recently.

Unibox Pricing: $15.99 for macOS; free or $4.99 for iOS

Alternative Email Apps

Still haven't found the perfect email app for your needs? Here are 11 more popular email apps that you might want to try:

App	Best for:	Works on:	Price:
Windows Mail and Calendar	On your PC, there's another free email app that keeps things simple: Windows Mail and Calendar, the latest version of what used to be called Outlook Express. It has all the basics you'd expect—including threaded email conversations, notifications, and flags to mark your most important messages—along with Outlook-style calendar integration. And it's designed for touchscreens, too.	Windows	Free
Gmail Mobile	Prefer Gmail's standard features over Inbox for Gmail's new task-centric design? Gmail's mobile app gives you the same tag-based organization and powerful search you'd expect in Gmail.com—in an app that works offline on your phone.	iOS, Android	Free
Mailbird	Another Windows email app with a modern design, Mailbird lets you personalize your inbox with custom layouts and sidebar theme colors. It also includes web app views of popular apps to work in Todoist, Slack, WhatsApp, and more from your email inbox.	Windows	Free; $1.58/mo. Pro plan
Dispatch	Dispatch helps you take action on your emails, with actions to send your messages to to-do list, calendar, or notes apps. You can then reply to messages faster on the go with snippets that include your signatures and any other text you often use in emails.	iOS	$6.99
MailMate	MailMate is an app for email power users who love plain text. You can jump through your emails with keyboard shortcuts, visualize the entire conversation behind a message, and reply with Markdown formatting.	Mac	$49.99
Hop	Prefer txt to email? Hop is a good app to try. It turns email threads into conversations much like Facebook Messenger or iMessage, with GIFs, voice messages, one-tap image sharing, and everything else you'd expect in a chat app—only here, your messages are sent as emails.	iOS, Android	Free
Kiwi for Gmail	Like Gmail's web app, but want to use it outside of your browser? Kiwi puts Google's web apps in their own window to make Gmail.com feel more like a native app. It doesn't work offline—but it does keep you from having to open your browser to check your Gmail inbox.	Windows, Mac	Free; $9.99
BlueMail	Want to email the same group of people easily every time? BlueMail's Group Mail is a simple way to bulk email from your phone—and its Clusters let you group all of the replies into easy-to-manage sets.	Android, iOS (Windows and Mac coming soon)	Free; paid for business
Thunderbird	The open source email app from the team behind Firefox, Thunderbird gives you a tabbed interface to manage your email and calendar together. It feels a bit dated, but its add-ons and themes let you customize it just like you customize your browser.	Windows, Mac, Linux	Free
IBM Notes	Another desktop client with a stronger bent for business, IBM Notes—the successor to Lotus Notes, the original desktop email app—integrates email messaging with business applications. It will feel familiar enterprise PC users, with the added bonus of bring-your-own-device portability.	Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux	$108+/yr.
eM Client	Want an Outlook-style inbox on your PC for free? eM Client combines email, calendar, contacts, and instant messaging in one app. And if you already have a large archive of emails from other apps, it's a great tool to import and view them all.	Windows	Free; $49.95 Pro

The Best Online Email Services and Apps

No matter which app you choose to manage your email, it all starts with your email account, which likely comes with an online email app—otherwise known as webmail. If your email address ends in @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @outlook.com, for instance, then your email comes with an online email app—Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook.com, respectively.

You likely already have an email service—and the simplest app you could use is the one that comes with it. But if you want a new email account, or just want to see what the other email services offer, here are the best services to consider—each designed to manage your email online in their webapp, or with any other email app you want.

The Best Webmail Services

App	Best for	Storage	Price
Gmail	powerful email organization and search	15GB	Free
Outlook.com	Office Online and Skype integration	15GB	Free
FastMail	ad-free mail on your domain	2GB	$3/mo.
iCloud Mail	sharing large attachments	5GB	Free
Zoho Mail	a social take on email	5GB	Free
Throttle	unique email addresses for every service	Unlimited	$4.99+/mo.

Gmail

for powerful email organization and search

Gmail is the gold standard in webmail. Its web app is good enough, it might be the best way to manage your email, no extra app needed.

With limitless ways to sort incoming email with filters and labels and exceptional spam filtering, Gmail makes it a breeze to get to your most important messages quickly. You can combine all of your email accounts in one Gmail accounts, forwarding messages and sending replies from other email services. You can also easily switch between other Gmail accounts easily for work and personal emails only a click away.

When it was first released in 2004, the 1GB of free storage Gmail offered at the time was hundreds of times more than Hotmail and other competitors offered. That made it possible to archive all of your email messages and search to find anything you need, rather than deleting old emails. Today, its free storage is standard—but still plenty to archive email for years without worry.

Gmail is great for personal email accounts, and its companion G Suite service lets you use Gmail's features for your work email accounts. You'll find extra features to manage your email and simplify your workflow in its settings, along with extras and addons you can add from other developers to make Gmail even better. If you want the best online email experience, it's hard to beat Gmail.

Gmail Pricing: Free with 15GB storage; from $5/month per user G Suite Basic plan

See Gmail integrations on Zapier

For a deeper look at Gmail's features and pricing, check out our Gmail review.

Outlook.com

for Office Online and Skype integration

Microsoft's online email application has come a long way since its inception in the 1990s as Hotmail, the email service you likely ditched in the mid-2000s for Gmail. Outlook.com, its current incarnation, is now a slick and powerful webmail app that integrates with Microsoft's suite of online services, including OneDrive, Office Online, and Skype.

Those integrations are its shining features, especially if you're a heavy Office user. You can edit Microsoft Word documents or start a Skype chat in Outlook.com, right alongside your email messages. You can also share larger attachments with OneDrive. Outlook.com doesn't include as many power-user features for managing email as Gmail—it doesn't support labels and its filters aren't as powerful—but its new interface borrows some of its namesake desktop app's design, making it a nice online option if you use Outlook at the office.

Outlook.com Pricing: Free with 15GB storage; Office 365 Business Email from $5/month per user for a similar email experience at work

FastMail

for ad-free mail on your domain

If you're looking to move away from ad-supported email services or want to use your own domain name for email, FastMail is one of the best services to try. It includes many of the features you expect from other webmail apps, including filters for organization and "personalities" to manage separate email accounts in the FastMail interface. And, it lives up to the fast in its name, with search tools that dig through your full inbox even from mobile.

Unlike Gmail and Outlook, Fastmail charges for use—though just a reasonable $3/month for its core email features, or $5/month if you want to use your own domain. That gives you far more storage than its competitors, though, with your own professional email address and an ad-free experience. That makes it one of the best ways to get personal email on your own domain today.

FastMail Pricing: $3/month Basic plan for core email features with 2GB storage; from $5/month Standard plan to use your own domain name with 25GB storage

See Zapier's IMAP integrations to automate your FastMail inbox

iCloud Mail

for sharing large attachments

Chances are you already have an iCloud email account, if you've ever owned an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. iCloud and its companion email service comes free with any Apple device, with an @icloud.com email address and 5GB of storage. Then, you can check your email in your device's Mail app, or just go to icloud.com/mail in any browser and you'll get an online email experience that's almost just like the Mail app on your iPad.

Aside from its shiny interface, iCloud Mail's best feature is Mail Drop, which lets you send up to 5GB of email attachments—that's hundreds of times larger than most email services allow, and it doesn't count towards your iCloud email storage. That makes it a great way to send files, in an easy-to-use email tool that's a nice option if you want a simple email experience and already own Apple devices.

iCloud Pricing: Free for 5GB storage

Use Zapier's IMAP integrations to automate your iCloud Mail inbox

Zoho Mail

for a social take on email

Want free email on your personal domain? Zoho Mail is the best option today. It's designed for business email, with tools to share messages and chat with your team without having to send full email messages. Instead, you'd just link your colleagues to a message, add a quick status update, and never have to worry about email subject lines again.

Those features won't work if you're using Zoho Mail for your personal email—but you'll still get Zoho Mail's newly redesigned webmail app along with IMAP sync that works with any other email app. And, you'll get email on your own domain for free, something few other services offer today.

Zoho Mail Pricing: Free with 5GB storage; from $3/month Standard plan for 30GB storage

See Zoho Mail integrations on Zapier

For a deeper look at Zoho Mail's features and pricing, check out our Zoho Mail review.

Throttle

for unique email addresses for every service

From the team behind Mail Pilot, a Mac app that attempted to simplify your inbox, Throttle turns your inbox around. Instead of 1 email address to use for everything, it gives you a new, unique email address for every service and newsletter you sign up for. It then organizes your messages into an RSS reader-style list of updates, with bookmarks for the messages you want to keep around and categories to group your messages.

You likely won't use it for all of your emails. Instead, you'll keep your standard email address for personal messages, and will use Throttle as your email address whenever you sign up for a new app or service. Then if you start getting spam, or can't unsubscribe from a list, just delete that email address in Throttle and you'll never get those messages again. And with a Pro account, you could add your own domain and use it as a unique way to manage your personal emails, too.

Throttle Pricing: from $4.99/month Plus plan for 100 addresses; $99/year for custom domain

Automate Your Email Inbox

Zapier's app integrations can manage your inbox for you

No matter how great your email app, you won't want to spend all day in your inbox sorting email messages and downloading attachments. Instead, use your email app's filters and search tools to sort messages, and give them superpowers with Zapier workflows.

Zapier works by keeping an eye on your inbox, looking for a designated event to occur—like "New Email" or "New Starred Email"—at which point it triggers an event in another app. For example, each time you receive an email, you could get a private Slack notification that includes the sender's name and email address, the message's title and preview snippet, and a link to that email.

Zapier works with Gmail, Office 365, and Microsoft Exchange—or any other email service through Zapier's IMAP integration. Those integrations can watch for new emails and notify you about them, or copy their details to share in chat, projects, and more. Or, using the free Zapier Email Parser, you can copy data directly from your emails—perhaps to list details from your form results or utility bills directly in a spreadsheet or accounting app.

Here are some popular Zapier email workflows to help you get started:

Get Custom Email Notifications and Share Team Emails

Turn Emails Into To-Dos

Never Hassle with Attachments Again

Archive Emails in Your Notes App

Parse Important Information Out of Emails

Get a Free Email Apps Cheat Sheet

Want a quick reference of the best email services and their best features? This downloadable infographic is just for you. It's a handy outline of the best email services from this article to share with your team.

The Best Email App for You

There are as many different email clients as there are ways to get things done. The key to picking the perfect email app is to isolate what you need out of email, then find an app that does just that.

Maybe you need something simple on your phone that lets you swipe through your inbox and triage emails. At work, you might need a more powerful email tool that filters messages, shows contact info, and helps you quickly find old correspondence. And at home, an online email app might be perfect so you can check your personal emails from anywhere. Or maybe, the best option is to pick a cross-platform app that works everywhere, for the same email experience on all of your devices.

What matters is that you can keep your inbox managed, without having to spend too much time in your email app. The best email app may, in fact, be the one you need to use least.

More Email Resources from Zapier

With your shiny new email app, checking your email every day might actually be fun. Don't let it get overwhelming again. These Zapier tutorials will help:

Keep Your Inbox From Overflowing

Tired of having a packed inbox, even though you spend so much time using email? This article includes 10 tips to help you keep your inbox under control. You'll learn how to separate your emails into zones, write purposeful emails that will get direct responses, uncover your most important email messages, and more.

→ 10 Realistic Ways to Keep Your Overflowing Inbox Under Control

Optimize Your Gmail Inbox

The best thing about Gmail is the advanced features, hidden tools, and add-ons that you can add to your inbox. There's keyboard shortcuts for almost everything, options to customize how almost everything in Gmail looks, filters to store messages automatically, and so much more—and that's just Gmail's built-in features. Add some Gmail add-ons, and you may just find that Gmail is the only email app you need.

→ "A Guide to Optimizing Gmail: 30 of the Best Tips, Tricks, Hacks and Add-Ons"

Originally published 2 June 2015; updated 17 May 2017. Zapier senior writer and editor Matthew Guay contributed to this article.

5 Hidden Evernote Features That Will Improve Your Notes and Note-Taking

plknudson@gmail.com (Peter Knudson) — Tue, 23 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

Evernote is a feature-rich collaboration and document organization tool used by over 150 million people. It excels at organizing large amount of notes, articles, and files of all types, allowing you to access them from multiple devices and share with team members.

However, few understand how truly deep and feature-rich Evernote can be. With a proper setup and integrations with Evernote, you can make Evernote your one-stop-shop for productivity and task management. In this guide, we will highlight five “hidden features” of Evernote that you might not be aware of, which you can plug directly into your workflow and get more stuff done, every day.

If you are brand new to Evernote, Head on over to our basics guide and learn the ropes first, then head back over here once you’re comfortable with Evernote.

What’s in this guide

Merge Notes in Evernote
Customizing the Toolbar and Sidebar
Password Protect Text in a Note
Set Up Reminder Subscriptions
Nest Tags and Notebooks

Merge Notes in Evernote

As you become increasingly familiar with Evernote, you may find yourself with too many notes within your notebooks. A cluttered Evernote is an unproductive one, so it’s important to take advantage of features that allow you to clean-up your Evernote desktop, such as archiving and stacking notebooks. We have previously covered how to start over in Evernote but if declaring Evernote bankruptcy sounds too dire for your tastes, you can take advantage of the merging feature to condense what could be dozens of similar notes into one, saving you lots of clutter headaches. Just in time for spring cleaning!

Merging files is important for consolidating similar items that belong together. Let’s walk through the merging functionality in Evernote and how you can take advantage of it in various ways.

First, navigate to the notebook with the similar types of notes you want to condense. In this example, we are locating the Read Later notebook, where articles were clipped from the web with the Evernote Web Clipper tool and stored as individual notes in that notebook. We want to free up space in the folder, without archiving the notes. Enter the merge feature.

Merge notes in Evernote into one

Select all of the files you’d like to combine by clicking on them and holding Shift, and then you can right-click, then select Merge Notes. Voila! You have now combined all your web-search into one handy note. You can select a new name for the merged note, if you want, to help describe its content, which can be useful for organization.

When you add a file to Evernote, such as a PDF or an image, Evernote defaults to creating a new note. The merge really shines in these cases, combining multiple files for maximum organization. For example, if you are taking an audio note (via File -> New Audio Note), you can then take a photo of the whiteboard after the meeting or class, and merge them together to create one “super meeting” note. This way, you will only need to share a single note with your team rather than several notes.

What other use cases are there for merging notes?

Receipt Organization: Through taking photos of receipts, scanning them, or through an app like Expensify, you can combine them into one Evernote note, such as “Expenses for the San Francisco Trip.” Don’t forget about Evernote’s digital image recognition feature as well, which recognizes text and helps you search through scanned receipts.
Resume Draft Revisions: If you are hunting for a new job, you can combine various resume versions as you improve them by merging the PDFs together, and add text change notes between them to help you remember what you changed.
Podcasts: If you have a premium Evernote account, you may have a large enough upload limit to upload your favorite podcasts into separate notes and merge them together to create a unified “podcast” note.

Merging notes is one of the best ways to minimize your Evernote footprint without having to resort to deleting or archiving. If you are the type of person starting new projects regularly, you will find great use in merging notes together to keep your progress on track and in one place.

Customize Evernote's Toolbar and Sidebar

While toolbar and sidebar optimization might seem like a trivial thing to fret over, if the perfect setup saves you seconds every time you need to access your most useful notes, these seconds add up over time. Just like your desk in real life, you’ll want to have everything in their correct place. A cluttered Evernote is a cluttered mind!

Whether you are looking at an Evernote blank slate after freshly installing it or have been using it for years, it always helps to reconfigure your menu layouts for speed of use. Located in Evernote’s menu bar, under View , are the menu options Customize Toolbar and Sidebar Options. Here is where you are able to change the look and layout of the top toolbar options (such as where the search bar is) as well as show and hide various notes and notebooks that appear on the left side of the screen.

Customize the toolbar

The key to optimizing the top toolbar is to ensure that your most used options are present on the screen and to hide features that you may never use. It helps to think like a user-experience designer when making these choices; Where does your eye naturally go when tabbing over to the Evernote app? What is your main motivation when you are doing so? Considerations include whether you primarily use Evernote in teams or as an individual, which buttons make sense to group together, and whether you prefer having more shortcuts or fewer when typing. Also worth noting: You can turn off the toolbar completely if you prefer to have more screen real estate for writing.

The default Evernote toolbar

Customized Evernote toolbar

My current setup removes many of the default options Evernote includes and instead simply has New Note option on the top right, since that is my most used option, with the search bar on the far right. I also include the Back and Forward options to the immediate left of the search bar, since when I am searching my notes I will often need to skip quickly around the documents. A good idea is to play around with various setups and see which ones make sense for your Evernote uses.

Customize the sidebar

Sick of the Atlas feature cluttering up your Evernote sidebar? Also found under the View menu is the Sidebar Option submenu, which gives you the ability to customize the sidebar options. Here you can deselect the Atlas option, as well turn on and off as many items as you like.

Make sure that the Shortcuts option is selected so you can move your most used Notebooks and Notes that you will need to access quickly. I personally keep my Read Later and To Do List notebooks here, as well as my Accounts note, where I keep track of frequent flyer numbers and other easily forgotten membership numbers (but make sure to encrypt anything important! More on that in a bit.)

Another useful Notebook to keep in the Shortcuts section is any starred or labeled items from Gmail, so that you can have all of your action items conveniently under one Evernote roof. You can create an automated workflow with Zapier to achieve this by connecting your Gmail account to your Evernote.

Lastly, also located under the Sidebar Options menu is the ability to turn the sidebar color either light or dark, depending on your preference or amount of available light.

Password-Protect Text Within a Note

Have you ever wanted to make sure that something you write in Evernote can’t be read by just anyone? Well, you’d be pleased to know that Evernote lets you password-protect any text, image, or other type of file within a note.

To access this feature, highlight the text that you wish to encrypt, right-click, and select the Encrypt Selected Text option. You can also choose whether you want Evernote to remember the password until you quit the application, so you won't be prompted again for the password.

Encrypt sensitive information and files in Evernote

You can also encrypt any file type that is within your chosen note as well—for example, an image file or PDF document in the notebook, a sound-clip, or a movie file.

What are some good uses cases for password protection within Evernote?

“Accounts” Notebook: When working with a team to manage shared logins—for social media accounts, Mailchimp, or Gmail accounts—keeping track of the usernames and passwords can be tricky. A solution would be to create a shared Evernote note with the credentials, while encrypting the text to make sure only those with permission can access them. Note: the owner of the shared note is the one who decides the password.
Securing Important Paperwork: If you are organizing your tax documents, you can add all your important files to an Evernote notebook, merge them into one, and encrypt the files so only you (and your accountant) can access them.
Frequent Flyer Numbers: Always fumbling around to enter your rewards number or frequent flyer information? Keep them in an Evernote note and password protect it for piece of mind.

Evernote’s security uses a 2048 bit RSA SSL encryption, which Evernote describes as industry standard for security, but the app only encrypts information that you password protect through the feature we described above. So that means if you have any important or sensitive files such as client documents or personal financial information, it’s a good idea to secure them with password encryption to be safe.

Two other pieces of Evernote security advice: Make sure to set the 4-digit passcode in the Evernote mobile app so that prying eyes don’t wander around your work notes. Secondly, ensure that you have two factor authentication set up.

Set Up Reminder Subscriptions

Each note you create in Evernote can be assigned a “reminder” date and time. This can be useful when you have a notebook that acts as a To Do List or Inbox, which allows you to schedule and prioritize your personal and professional due dates.

However, did you know that Evernote can also send you an email summary about that day’s reminders that are due? You can locate this feature by navigating to the notebook your note is in, clicking the Settings button (which looks like a gear), and then selecting subscription settings. Here you can manage your reminder emails that Evernote will send you. The email reminders are beneficial to those who are first starting out with Evernote to use the service daily and get maximum usage out of it. But it's also handy for power users who rely on Evernote as their productivity hub.

Get daily reminders in email from Evernote

If reminders aren’t enough scheduling power for you, you can connect Evernote to Google Calendar and automatically create new calendar events when you create an Evernote reminder. You’ve now created the trifecta of calendar synergy and can’t possibly miss a deadline again.

Nest Tags and Notebooks

Evernote power users are often torn on the use of tags: some believe they are worth the effort to add, while others believe that the search algorithm has gotten so powerful that they deem them superfluous. In either case, there are certain times where they are very useful—such organizing large amount of notes, as well as categorizing notes in two separate notebooks under one tag.

When organizing notebooks, for example, users can combine two or more notebooks together into “stacks.” This provides some level of hierarchy between notebooks but not a deep one. A hidden feature about tags, however, is the ability to to give multiple layers of hierarchy. Using tags as well as notebooks, you can browse an enormous amount of documents easily.

Organize tags by nesting them

For tags, one parent tag can have up to 10 child tags. As an example, you may have a “receipts” tag, and nested under that you can have “food,” “lodging,” or “bills.” One level further, “gas” and “electricity” tags can be nested under the “bills” tag.

Some practical examples of nested tag uses:

“Photography” parent tag, with “landscape” and “portrait” child tags
“Recipe” parent tag, with “baked goods” or “slow cooker” child tags
“Workout” parent tag, with “cardio” or “free weights” child tags

Whether you are a notebook stacks fan or a nested tags person, understanding the different ways that Evernote can organize your data is key to becoming an Evernote pro. As we have mentioned a few times already, a well-organized Evernote is the key to success.

More Hidden Features of Evernote

Evernote Templates: To make an Evernote "template," create a note that you wish to use multiple times, then navigate to File -> Export Note. You can then re-open that “.enex” file as needed when creating new notes as copies of the exported note.
Screenshot Clipper Tool: In addition to the web clipper Chrome extension, Evernote also allows you to customize a hotkey from within the app's settings, which will bring up a selector to save an image of your current screen selection as an Evernote note.
Note Information: You can find the number of words in an note, as well as edit the existing metadata of a note (such as tags, author, last modified date) by selecting the Information button at the top of a note’s header menu (it looks like a lowercase letter “i”).

Evernote is an extremely powerful tool and one that can replace many of your existing apps—such as screenshot clipper, to-do list app, and cloud-file manager. The best way for new users to feel the full potential of Evernote is to invest time in adding all of their work, projects, and documents to Evernote to see how the app can improve their workflow. However, even after months or years of use, Evernote can still surprise users with features that are not as immediately obvious. From merging PDF files with images to creating a useful nested-tag organization structure, Evernote’s feature depth can expand to fit any productivity junkie’s needs.

Do you have any additional Evernote pro tips? Let us know in the comments below.

Keep Reading:

Remember Everything with Evernote: 30+ of the Best Tips and Tricks

OneNote 101: Take More Creative and More Organized Notes with Microsoft OneNote

melanie.pinola@zapier.com (Melanie Pinola) — Mon, 22 May 2017 12:45:36 -0000

You have a ton of apps and tools to choose from when it comes to taking notes and saving information. OneNote, however, stands out among note-taking apps for its incredible flexibility, colorful interface, and robust features.

Over the last decade or so, I've tried dozens of note-taking apps and strategies—from using plain text files or good old paper notebooks to powerful tools like Evernote. I always come back to OneNote. If you haven't given it a try yet, you might be about to discover your new favorite productivity tool.

OneNote has been around for a dozen years as part of the Microsoft Office suite. Despite that, the app has long been probably the most underrated app in Microsoft's arsenal. You can chalk that up to the software being a paid app limited to Windows up until a couple of years ago.

That means many people have been missing out on what makes OneNote such an awesome, all-purpose tool not just for notes, but for capturing information of any kind.

Feel too limited by simple notes apps and tend to think visually and non-linearly? You'll likely appreciate OneNote's freeform notes canvas, which lets you add any kind of content—including text, images, videos, tables, and files—anywhere on the page.

Fond of scribbling on napkins or sketching out ideas? OneNote's inking tools let you draw using your trackpad or mouse, as well as a stylus or your fingers if you use a tablet or touchscreen PC.

Tend to collect a ton of research and want a way to easily organize it? OneNote was designed just for you, with features such as a web clipper, email-to-notes, and quick notes shortcuts, not to mention that intuitive notebook interface.

It's the digital notebook that lets you take notes any way you want. In this OneNote tutorial, we'll teach you how to take your notes to the next level.

OneNote Tutorial: Get to Know Notebooks, Sections, and Pages
Capture Your Ideas or Information from Anywhere
Automatically Create OneNote Notes from Your Favorite Apps
Embed Anything in OneNote and Create Special Kinds of Notes
Tag and Link Your Notes to Find Them Instantly
Share Your Notes
Extend OneNote with Third-Party Tools

OneNote Tutorial: Get to Know Notebooks, Sections, and Pages

The first step to getting started with OneNote, naturally, is to go grab the free app at https://www.onenote.com/. OneNote is available for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. There's also an online version and a Windows 10 App version that's more touch-friendly than the desktop version and also simpler. Each version differs from the others at least slightly in terms of features, with OneNote on Windows desktop packed with the most features. However, the essential ways you can use OneNote, such as how you organize notes, are the same no matter what device you're using.

Let's take a look at the interface:

I took this screenshot with OneNote and then annotated it in OneNote. So meta.

If you've ever used a spiral notebook or a binder for your notes—especially if you've used tabs to split pages into sections—using OneNote will be intuitive for you. The three main parts to OneNote are notebooks, sections, and pages.

Notebooks let you collect related information in one central place, just like you would with a paper notebook. For example, you could have separate notebooks for Home, School, and Work or make even more specific notebooks, such as Home Improvement Projects, Calculus 101, or Client Project X.

Switch between notebooks using the dropdown arrow or, in the Windows version, keep your notebooks list open in a sidebar by clicking the dropdown arrow and then the pin icon.

Sections help you group information in each notebook with colorful tabs running across the top of the app. For example, if you have a notebook for a specific project, you could create sections for each phase of the project or other criteria. Each section holds one or more notes—which are fittingly called pages, to carry the notebook analogy further.

Sections can even be grouped together. That comes in handy when you have too many section tabs to fit on one screen. For example, if you had a meeting notes notebook with sections for each monthly meeting as well as quarterly and yearly review meetings, you could group all the monthly meetings into one section group. Right-click on a section tab and select "New section group," then you can add sections to your new group.

Want to secure the pages in a section? You can password protect them by right-clicking on the tab. This time, select "Password Protection."

Pages are listed in the right-hand navigation pane (or the left, if you change the settings in the Windows program). Unlike typical notes apps that work like word processors, on OneNote's pages, you can place and drag content around anywhere on the page: checklists next to photos, text boxes side by side, audio recordings next to your notes, and so on.

OneNote's unique because of its freeform pages. Image credit: Kathy Jacobs

This freeform layout not only helps you create versatile notes with different kinds of content positioned exactly how you like, it aids in the creative and learning process. When taking notes during a meeting or class, for example, you can paste in reference material or questions to the side of the page.

Kathy Jacobs, a former software tester and OneNote MVP, uses OneNote not just for notes but for writing her articles on Medium precisely because OneNote doesn't force you to think linearly:

I can add images and annotations in the article or to the side. I can mark changes, sources, and things to research right on the page. I find it easier to do what I need in OneNote than in Word. And since the reviewing options were added to OneNote, I can research in OneNote and send it straight to the page.

I also find that the text I copy and paste from OneNote to the web is cleaner than any I have ever created in Word.

I similarly use OneNote as my main writing tool because while writing a draft, I can cut parts of it I'm not sure I want to keep but still have them accessible to the side of the draft just in case I change my mind. In other note or writing apps, I'd have to go back through the revision history to find those removed words.

Tip: For selecting text or objects to copy or cut them, use OneNote's versatile keyboard shortcut. If you click outside of any section on the page and press CTRL + A, OneNote will highlight all of the sections on the page. When you press CTRL + A within a section, OneNote will highlight just the paragraph or object your cursor is currently on. Press CTRL + A again to highlight everything in the section. And press that keyboard shortcut a third time to highlight all of the sections on the page.

Another unique advantage to OneNote is the ability to create a hierarchy of notes. You can create up to three levels of pages and subpages and then easily collapse or expand them by clicking the up or down arrow next to the top note. This makes skimming through a long list of pages easier and helps organize related pages.

You can even drag-and-drop pages and sections to reorder them however you like—something also not possible in most other notes apps.

OneNote Notebook Examples

Now that you're familiar with the interface, what are you going to do with OneNote?

By default, OneNote comes with a "Personal (Web)" notebook that you can use as your central notebook. But you can create an unlimited number of other notebooks and, within them, an unlimited number of sections and pages.

Before you dive in, think about the kinds of information you want to create or collect so you can establish a structure for your notebooks and then start stashing everything in OneNote.

One way to define your notebooks is to consider the roles you play—such as consultant, parent, friend, volunteer, homeowner, artist, amateur chef, and so on (a la Franklin Covey's productivity system). Then create distinct notebooks for each role.

Or you could create notebooks based on the types of information you're collecting and recording. For example, you might have a notebook for tasks and projects management—perhaps use OneNote with the Getting Things Done, GTD, system or as a digital Bullet Journal.

If your projects tend to require lots of notes or research, create a notebook for each project, effectively turning OneNote into a project management tool, thanks in large part to its great integration with Outlook and other Microsoft Office apps. And you could create another notebook just for reference materials you will turn to time and again.

As a loyal OneNote user (since circa 2004), my notebooks have morphed over time. Currently, I have notebooks for:

Home and Family: with sections for emergency info (contacts, locations of documents, insurance information), home reference, computer reference, personal finance, travel logs, and a section for each family member. This is shared with my husband and password-protected.
Zapier Work Notebook: with a section group for articles plus sections for meeting notes, marketing projects, HR stuff, and work-related travel
Freelance Clients: One notebook for each client with sections for administrative stuff (invoices and contracts), article ideas, article drafts and research, and an archive of completed articles
Side Projects: with sections on personal projects and bucket list things I'd like to accomplish (someday), such as learning French and writing a children's book

Jacobs says she has too many notebooks to list, but her main ones include:

Two shared notebooks on OneDrive that are accessible from anywhere containing: sections on family history, pieces written, income tax notes, monthly budgets, Christmas lists conference notes, presentation materials, and so much more
Travel packing and to-do lists for trips
Moving notebook that contains everything imaginable, from what goes in the car to what goes on the truck to what gets sold to when we plan to stop where and who we are connecting with
Two recipes notebooks. One is the recipes Jacob and her husband use to teach their outdoor cooking class. This contains the notes for the classes and the recipes they have posted online. The other is a shared recipe notebook that the couple gave to our goddaughter when she graduated high school.
Shared notebooks used with her co-author to write their book about OneNote. "We set it up to share content with each other and to make sure we had everything covered that was in the outline. It made it much easier to develop examples—all we had to do was take screenshots of the features as we used them to develop the book."

Your notebooks will depend on your interests, of course, but a little structure up front will help keep your notes organized.

Don't worry too much, though—you can always drag or right-click on pages and sections to move them to other parts of OneNote. And you can close notebooks that are no longer active, such as a finished project notebook, to keep the notebook list tidy (right-click on the notebook and choose "Close").

Capture Your Ideas or Information from Anywhere

A note-taking and information-capturing app is only as good as its ability to help you get your ideas and any other kind of content quickly onto the page. Thankfully, OneNote offers several ways to do that. And it offers special tools to enhance your notes with things like automatic math calculations and icon-based tags.

The Many Ways to Create a Note in OneNote

What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG): Typing a note in OneNote is just like using Microsoft Word. You get the familiar Office Ribbon with text formatting tools and a few preformatted styles you can apply.

If you use the inking option in OneNote—writing by hand with your stylus or finger on a touchscreen—OneNote's superb handwriting recognition will even be able to search your scribbles or convert your writing to text.

Create a Quick Note: You don't even have to have OneNote open to create a note. On Windows, press Win + N to create a note, which will be saved automatically to your Personal (Web) notebook under the Quick Notes section. Or press Win + Shift + S to take a screenshot; you'll be asked where you want to save the image.

On iOS, you can use 3D Touch to quickly add a new note or take a photo and send it to OneNote, as well as view recent notes. And on Android, you can use the OneNote Badge—a floating button on your screen to do the same. On both platforms, you can save links to websites as OneNote notes from your mobile browser's sharing menu.

Use the Web Clipper: Similar to Evernote, OneNote has a web clipper browser extension that lets you quickly save anything from the web. You can save the entire page, a portion of the page, a stripped down version of the page with just the text or a link to the page with preview copy. Select which notebook you want to send the clipping to and add a note about it if you like.

Send Emails to OneNote: Forward or send any email to me@OneNote.com to have it saved in OneNote in your default notebook and section of your choosing. You'll need to set up one or more email addresses you want this to work with first.

Scan Documents or Take Photos with Office Lens: Microsoft's Office Lens app for Windows 10, iOS, and Android uses your device's camera to capture notes on a whiteboard, scan receipts or business cards, and more. It automatically trims and cleans up your images before saving them into OneNote for you.

Dock OneNote to the desktop: The "Dock to Desktop" feature for OneNote on Windows desktop puts OneNote into a minimalist, mostly menu-free panel on the side of your desktop, so you can take notes while referring to another app, such as a video in your browser, a PDF file, or other reference material.

Pro tip: Use the Ctrl + Alt + D keyboard shortcut to quickly dock OneNote

Automatically Create OneNote Notes from Your Favorite Apps

Want to save even more time? Automatically create new notes by integrating OneNote with over 500 other apps using Zapier. For example, you can create OneNote notes from Trello cards or labeled emails in Gmail, save Slack messages to OneNote, and more:

Embed Anything in OneNote and Create Special Kinds of Notes

OneNote's pages are versatile and smart. You can embed all sorts of content in OneNote and make that content searchable or convert it to a different format. For example, from the Insert menu, you can:

Record audio or video: Record a lecture, interview, or meeting, and you can search for key terms within the audio or video file later. You'll need to enable searching within audio or video from OneNote's option settings first. (Video recording is not available on the Mac.)

Insert a PDF printout or an image: Any text in the PDF or picture will be searchable (easy OCR option to copy text from images with a right-click!), and you can also annotate the content using the tools in the Draw menu.

Attach a file: Add any kind of file to a note as a shortcut. For some types of files, such as Word docs, spreadsheet files, PDFs or plain text files, you can click on the "eye" button on the file thumbnail to see a preview of the file contents.

Embed live, interactive objects: Insert YouTube videos, Google Maps via Microsoft Sway, 3D sketches from Sketchfab, animated GIFs, live programming code from Repl.it, Vine videos, and much more. Here's a demo page of the live objects you can embed into OneNote via OneNote Central's curator Marjolein Hoekstra, OneNote MVP. (Follow their Twitter for the latest OneNote news and tips.)

Add a table: Just click the table button in the Insert menu and select how many rows and columns you want for your table to create one on the page.

On Windows desktop, you can also embed an Excel spreadsheet—changes made to the spreadsheet file are reflected in OneNote and vice versa.

Draw and insert shapes: With the desktop apps, you can draw on the page or annotate anything on the page with OneNote's drawing tools. Highlight a part of a screenshot, make a rough sketch of a logo, and more.

The Windows 10 app includes a pencil tool in addition to the inking tool found in the other apps. Image via the Office Blog

OneNote's ink shape recognition tool can even take your rough hand-drawn shapes into perfectly formed ones.

Image via the Office Blog

Insert math equations and perform calculations: Work with math a lot or even just occasionally? Wait 'til you see how OneNote can help you out there. Just start typing in an equation, such as 5*7+(9/3.14) and then the equal sign (=) right after (no spaces), and OneNote will calculate the answer for you.

Organize, Tag, and Link Your Notes

With the wide variety of content types you can add to your notes, and the many ways to capture information quickly, it's easy to amass a ton of pages and notebooks in OneNote. The main problem that can lead to: How will you find the information again later?

OneNote's search box can help you find the information you need on the current page, a section, section group, or specific notebook, as well as search all notebooks at once. Standard search operators work well here.

Tag Parts of a Page

Beyond search, though, you can also structure your pages and notebooks for easy organization and readability using OneNote's tags.

Unlike other apps that let you tag only the entire note, with OneNote you can tag any part of the page. So, for example, you can tag one paragraph as an idea, a sentence later on as a to-do item, and another part of the page as critical. Think of these tags like sticky notes you can apply to your notes. You can create custom tags in the Windows desktop version of OneNote.

Tags not only make your notes more scannable, they make drilling down to specific types of content across your notebooks a breeze. One Windows desktop, for example, when you search for a word or phrase or use the "Find Tags" button in the Home menu, OneNote's tags summary pane shows you the tags you've applied and gives you quick access to them.

Link Your Notes Together

Another feature that will help you organize your notes better: Links. You can add links to other pages, to notebooks, and even to specific paragraphs. Right-click on what you want to create a link for and choose "Copy Link To…" Then paste the link on the page you want to add it.

Pro Tip: If you know the name of the page or notebook you want to link to, just type in its name between double brackets, like this: Worked on [[OneNote Draft]] article. OneNote will insert the link for you.

This linking ability means you can create your own personal wiki easily in OneNote.

Share Your Notes

If you want to collaborate on notes and projects with others, OneNote's got your back. You can share shopping lists with your significant other, reference material with your team, and pretty much anything else you store in OneNote.

First, make sure your notebooks are synced to your OneDrive account if you want to share them with others.

In the Windows desktop app, click File then Share to share the notebook with others via email or grab a link to the notebook. Or you could go to File then Send and email the current page of the notebook, save it as a PDF attachment, send the page to Word, or create a blog post from the page.

On the Mac and OneNote Online, click the sharing icon at the top right of the app (it looks like a person with a plus sign on it) to get the sharing options.

Anyone you share your notebook with can access it on the web or in their OneNote app. Any changes you make on the page will happen in real-time, with the person's initials next to each item added or changed.

Extend OneNote's Power with Add-ins

OneNote is already a powerful note-taking and information collection tool. You can get even more out of OneNote with third-party add-ins and services.

Onetastic is a must-have add-in for OneNote power users

Onetastic supercharges OneNote with tools like custom styles, seeing your notes in a calendar view, and access to hundreds of free macros. The latter puts shortcuts to frequent tasks such as moving a page to the top of a section, getting the word count on a page, or creating a new page with today's date as the title in the OneNote ribbon. You can also create your own macros or edit macros you download, so you can truly customize how OneNote works for you.

Onetastic is available for OneNote for Windows desktop and is free for the built-in tools but costs $15 for the pro license, which gives you access to the macros.

If you connect OneNote with Zapier, you can also automatically copy OneNote notes to your other favorite apps. For example:

Create your own OneNote integration with your favorite apps

OneNote might seem intimidating because of the empty pages and all of the features compared to simpler note-taking apps, but once you get started using it, you might just never turn back.

Play around with the kinds of things you can store in your notebooks, try out some of the tips above, and let us know how you're using OneNote.

Keep reading:

Title photo by Microsoft.

Sound Smarter with These Vocabulary Building Apps and Tips

bellebethcooper@gmail.com (Belle Cooper) — Thu, 18 May 2017 12:45:34 -0000

Have you ever felt that high from finally employing a new, SAT-worthy word, matching it to the exact meaning you're trying to convey? It's like fitting the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle; there's something incredibly satisfying about using words effectively.

Of course, vocabulary isn't just a feel-good hobby. It helps us understand others, and convey meaning effectively. A deep vocabulary allows you to be more intentional about your message. And no matter your job title, the right words minimize the contextual gray areas that derail tasks, meetings, and projects.

Read on for over a dozen vocabulary-building apps and resources, along with handful of research-based strategies for remembering what you learn.

The Best Vocabulary Building Apps and Websites
The Best Vocabulary Building Blogs and Podcasts
Vocabulary Apps that Test Your Knowledge
Sites that Make Vocabulary Fun
Research-Backed Tips to Expand Your Vocabulary

The Best Vocabulary Building Apps and Websites

You could look up a new word at random in your dictionary every day and test yourself, but there's a variety of useful tools available that make the process of improving your vocabulary even easier. (That said, the dictionary approach can be a lot of fun; it's how I found out "ha-ha" is a real word.)

Vocabulary.com for New Word Testing (Web, iOS, Android)

The Vocabulary.com mobile app not only serves as a trusty pocket dictionary, but it also helps you memorize words. It does so by giving you the option to "Start learning this word." Clicking the prompt adds it to your "Words I'm Learning" list.

Saved words in your Vocabulary.com account (you'll need to sign up to make use of this feature) are then resurfaced in the app's word quizzes. If you haven't saved any words, you can start building your vocabulary by selecting a pre-populated list, such as "100 Words Every Middle Schooler Should Know."

Beyond its two popular apps, Vocabulary.com, as the name suggests, can also be accessed from the web.

Magoosh Vocabulary Builder for GRE, SAT, and TOEFL Prep (iOS, Android)

The Vocabulary Builder app from Magoosh guides you through dozens of vocabulary lists. With a clear interface, automatic repetition for incorrect words, and contextual aids, the Vocabulary Builder app is about as straightforward as you could hope for when it comes to learning exam-level words.

Choose your vocabulary list based on the test you want to study for (GRE, SAT, or TOEFL), or just go through the lists at your whim. Each test features multiple categories (Basic/Common Words, Intermediate Words, Advanced Words), and several levels within each word category. The Vocabulary Builder visually tracks your progress through each level, category, and test, which provides a nice little motivational boost.

Anki or Quizlet for Old-School Word Learning (Web, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac)

If you need to learn a particular set of words, or just prefer the familiar flashcard experience, try Anki or Quizlet. Both offer vast libraries of shared flashcard decks, such as Anki's "4000 Essential English Words" and Quizlet's "Computer Engineer English Vocabulary II." Plus, they support media like images and sound, too. Where the two apps differ, however, is the use of spaced repetition—a feature offered only by Anki.

Reverse Dictionary for Finding the Right Word (Web)

For those frustrating times when you can't place the perfect word, Reverse Dictionary surfaces a set of options from a description phrase. Search "hard to describe," for example, and the reverse lookup engine suggests "elusive," "nondescript" and another 98 words—each search yields hundreds of results.

Reverse Dictionary and similar reverse word search sites like Wordsmyth and Dictionary.com are go-to resources when a thesaurus doesn't do the job. Though if you'd rather opt for a mobile app, Writing Aid (iOS) offers a similar solution.

Kindle Vocabulary Builder for Remembering New Words (Kindle)

If you read on a Kindle device, you might have noticed a word-learning feature called Kindle Vocabulary Builder. Turn it on, and any word that you look up while reading (using the built-in dictionary) is added to your word list.

You can review your word list anytime, and since looking up a word in context is easy (just hold-press the word), this is a quick way to build up a personal vocabulary list.

The Best Vocabulary Building Blogs and Podcasts

Blogs dedicated to language help you learn words that you might not come across otherwise. They provide an easy way to expand your vocabulary without putting in much effort—just subscribe to an email newsletter or RSS feed and you'll get regular doses of word knowledge. Pull that RSS feed into app integration tool Zapier, and send those vocabulary boosters to apps where you or your team can't miss them, like Slack or your inbox.

Subscribe to a Word of the Day Series to Expand Your Vocabulary

Along with millions of words, definitions, and sample sentences, online dictionaries have another reliable offering: a word of the day. It's a painless way to build your vocabulary over a 365-day stretch. Here are some of our favorites:

Wordnik Word of the Day (Web, Email)
New York Times' Vocabulary.com Word of the Day (Web)
Dictionary.com Word of the Day (Web, Email, iOS, Android)
A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg (Web, Email, RSS)
Word of the Day (iOS)
LookUp (iOS)

Grammar Girl for Word Usage Tips

The Grammar Girl section of the Quick and Dirty Tips site is full of articles about word usage—from punctuation to context to etymology. Mignon Fogarty, the "grammar girl," offers word tips in a weekly five-minute podcast, too.

Lexicon Valley for a Unique Word Knowledge

Slate podcast Lexicon Valley explores the English language by unpacking words, language history, and grammar. An episode in May, for example, examined the creation of foreign languages used in Game of Thrones.

Lexicon Valley is a fascinating show for language fans. You'll find interesting stories about word history, like "Why is pumpernickel bread named for a farting devil?", and explorations of grammar in episodes like "Shakespeare used double negatives. Why don't we?" and "Is 'try and' an acceptable substitute for 'try to'?"

Vocabulary Apps that Test Your Knowledge

Merriam-Webster for a Quick Assessment (Web)

You've written down new words to learn, studied up and started using them regularly. But has your overall vocabulary level increased? Find out with Merriam Webster's 10-question quiz, "How Strong Is Your Vocabulary?". After you take the test—it has several versions in case you're unhappy with the first one—you can ask for your score in comparison to others in your age group.

Knoword for a Tough Test (Web, iOS, Android)

Knoword is the simplest app on this list. After you press "Let's go!" it serves you a short definition. In the answer blank, you'll find the first letter of the corresponding word. It might seem easy at first, but that's because you have it on the default "Novice" level. Try "Hotshot" or "Wizard" to really give yourself a tough vocabulary test.

Quizzitive for a Challenging Game (iOS)

Unless you have the same IQ as Ken Jennings, Merriam Webster's Quizzitive word game should be a challenge. It starts at level one with words like "obdurate" and "insouciance," testing you to define as many terms as you can in a 20-second sprint. It's one of four such quizzes the app presents over 10-word levels. If you get past the first two, however, you'll need to pony up $1.99 to play the final eight.

Sites that Make Vocabulary Fun

I always prefer to learn while I'm having fun, so here are a few games and handy tools that will help you improve your vocabulary in other ways.

Analyze Words for Examining Your Social Media Speak

If you're curious about the words you already use, Analyze Words is an entertaining tool to explore your vocabulary. Just type in your Twitter handle and the service analyzes your recent Tweets to see what communication styles they fall under.

Word Game Apps for Putting New Words to Use

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of word games, each with their own twist. Here are a few that I've enjoyed playing, which have improved my vocabulary along the way.

Letterpress (iOS; head-to-head) - Play against a friend in a word game like none other that has you stealing letters to create new words.
Catena (iOS; head-to-head) - Use the last letters of your opponent's word to make a new one.
Word Pickle (iOS; solo) - Construct as many words as you can from a 20-letter grid.
Words with Friends - The classic, Scrabble-like game pits you against your Facebook friends to see who can create the highest-scoring words.
SpellUp (iOS; solo) - Another game in which you connect letters to form words, this time with an astrological twist.
Lexology (iOS; solo) - Enter words based on a letter you're supplied in order to collect letters and advance in the game.
Qiktionary (iOS; solo) - Solve words puzzles to earn interesting fact cards.
7 Little Words (iOS, Android, Web) - Solve daily puzzles with multi-letter tiles and a list of words to find.

My favorite at the moment is Qiktionary, which is a relaxing guessing game that rewards you with fascinating facts.

Words For That for Inventing New Words

Words For That collects user-submitted suggestions for new words and usage examples. Although it won't teach you accepted English vocabulary, it's a fun creative outlet. Browse entries by most popular, new and "up-and-coming," or submit your own.

Research-Backed Tips to Expand Your Vocabulary

To tap into the power of visualizing, I've been drawing pictures of French words I'm learning.

I'm sure you're already downloading a bunch of apps to kick off your vocabulary learning. But there's one more part of the puzzle that's important for effective learning (even though it's less fun than word games). Understanding how your brain learns can help you make better use of learning time—even if it just means playing word games before bed instead of first thing in the morning.

Repeat at Intervals

One of the best approaches to learning new vocabulary words is to employ spaced repetition, studying the new words using longer and longer intervals. As you continue to study the new information, you get better at recognizing it and remembering what it means, so you can take a longer rest before testing yourself again.

For instance, you might learn a new word today and remind yourself of what it means again tonight before you go to bed. Then you might remind yourself again tomorrow, and then wait two days before testing yourself. Then you might test yourself after a week, after two weeks, and after a month. If you fail the test, you condense the rest period before testing again. If you get it right, you make the rest period a little longer next time.

A related effective learning method is to interleave information you already know with what you're learning. For instance, if you're learning two new words, try testing yourself on a set of words you already know and add these new words in-between the familiar ones. Interleaving plays into our natural tendencies to spot patterns and outliers, according to UCLA researcher Bob Bjork.

As you learn new words, keep adding them to your study list. Over time you'll continue reviewing words you've learned, as well as improving your ability to pick up new words by interleaving them.

Use Visuals

Did you know 50% of the brain's resources are used up on vision alone? We spend half our brain power on noticing motion, shapes, and colors around us.

Our eyes are not only power-hungry, they're also sponges for information. If you use visual aids to remind yourself what new words mean, you'll be more likely to take that information in the first time around, and to remember it later.

In fact, we even treat text as images: our brains see lots of tiny pictures on the page. Compared to looking at one image, it's much less efficient to rely on text for learning.

Try using image-based flashcards or adding pictures to your vocabulary definitions to speed up the learning process.

Get Some Sleep

Although scientists are still working out what happens in our bodies when we're asleep, it's clear that sleep plays a big role in learning. If you learn something new and have a nap before being tested on it, you'll be more likely to remember it than if you were tested after an interval that didn't include any sleep.

It seems that during sleep our short-term memories (including things we've just learned) are consolidated into our long-term memory. If we don't go to sleep, this process can't take place, and we're more likely to lose the information we just learned.

It's also important to get plenty of sleep before learning something new. By consolidating your memories, sleep essentially clears out the "inbox" of your brain—all the short-term memories you gathered throughout the day. Clearing these out gives you more room for taking in new information, and improves your ability to learn.

Learning new words can take time and effort, but these apps and resources make it a fun, easy process. When you set out to expand your own vocabulary, however, keep in mind that you might find a totally new technique that works for you. One popular approach not covered in this post, for example, is to rely on mnemonics for learning new words—there's even a Mnemonic Dictionary site dedicated to the method.

So have fun, experiment, find the rhythm that works best for you—and let us know your best tips in the comments.

The 40 Best To-Do List Apps in 2017

akunesh@me.com (Andrew Kunesh) — Thu, 18 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

What was once the simple choice between using a notebook, legal pad, or stack of Post-it notes to manage your personal to-do list is now a mind-numbing decision between dozens of to-do apps. Flashy apps that offer more features than you could ever use. Free apps that are so bare you wonder how they'd be helpful at all. And paid apps that look just right, but you're not sure it's worth paying the price just to find out.

Wonder no more. We've rounded up 40 of the most popular to-do apps, ranging from simple apps with just a list of tasks to advanced apps that organize your tasks, projects, notes and more. We've tested each app, found its best features, and listed its pricing and supported devices to help you quickly find what you want. No matter which task management method you use, there's an app for you.

How to Pick a To-Do App

There are more to-do list apps than you could ever try

"There are approximately 17 million software applications and web sites out there built to manage your to do list," Gina Trapani, founder of Lifehacker, wrote in 2006. Over a decade later, it feels like that number might actually be accurate with the seemingly infinite number of to-do list apps in the App Store and Google Play.

So where do you begin? Certainly not in those app stores. Instead, start with your task management method: How do you go about ticking off your to-dos? Do you group them in a certain way? Are you in need of extra details, or do you keep task descriptions short? Are you a more visual person wanting to see your progress? Do you want to keep a record of what you've done?

Answering these questions helps you decide which task management method you follow. If you simply need a list of to-dos to start ticking off, look for a "Grocery List" app". If you like the idea of organizing your tasks into detailed projects with subtasks, attachments, and more, get a Getting Things Done app. If seeing your tasks go from "to-dos" to "doing" to "dones" is helpful—or you want a more graphical way to manage tasks—check out a Kanban board app. Or if it's all about keeping it simple and, for the most part, staying out of app, try the plain text approach.

40 of the Best To-Do Apps

Grocery List apps for simple task lists
Getting Things Done (GTD) apps for detailed task lists, project, and more
Kanban Board apps to visualize task workflows
Plain Text apps to manage tasks free-form
Other options when nothing else works

Grocery List Apps

Apple's Reminders app on macOS

For a simple way to manage your tasks, apps that follow the Grocery List method—that let you just list the things you need to do one after another, like you list the groceries you need to buy—are best. Some include just task lists, others come with extra features like notes or due dates. The main focus though is just on listing the things you need to do.

Grocery List apps are the most common type of to-do list apps. While they're each simple to use, there are a number of apps with their own unique take on simple task management. Here are some of the best:

The 19 Best Simple To-Do List Apps

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
Microsoft To-Do	a to-do list that suggests what to do next	Free	Android, iOS, Windows, Web
Apple Reminders	quick-and-simple to-dos	Free	iOS, Web, Mac
Google Keep	a bulletin board for your tasks	Free	Android, iOS, Web
Google Tasks	simple tasks in Gmail and Google Calendar	Free	Web
Remember The Milk	simple yet powerful task management	Free; $39/yr. Pro	Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows, Mac, Linux, Web
Momentum	simple to-dos in every New Tab	Free; $2.50/mo. Plus	Chrome
Focuster	quickly scheduling your tasks	$9.99/mo. Basic	Web
Checkvist	outline-style tasks and keyboard shortcuts	Free; $3.90/mo. Pro	Web
Ikiru	simple, paper-style task lists	$4.99	iOS
MinimaList	a plain task list that keeps you focused	Free	iOS
I Done This	a list of everything you've done	Free; $12.50/mo. Standard	Web
Swipes	snoozing tasks until you're ready to do them	Free; $4.99/mo. Premium	Android, iOS, Web, Mac
TeuxDeux	a daily list of tasks	$3/mo.	iOS, Web
SomTodo	tasks with folder organization	Free; $3.99/mo. Premium	Android, iOS
CARROT	turning tasks into a game	$2.99	iOS
Due	a detailed time-table for tasks	$4.99; $9.99	iOS, Mac
Moleskine Timepage	a to-do list style calendar	$4.99; $6.99	iOS
Any.do	quickly organizing tasks into groups	Free; $2.99/mo. Premium	Android, iOS, Web, Mac
Asana	a simple approach to personal and team tasks	Free; $9.99/mo. Premium	Android, iOS, Web

Microsoft To-Do (Android, iOS, Windows, Web)

for a to-do list that suggests what to do next

The new task app from the team that brought us Wunderlist, Microsoft To-Do is a great way to manage tasks. List everything you need to do—or import tasks from Outlook, Todoist, and Wunderlist so you don't have to start over. Then add notes and due dates to tasks, along with an extra reminder to help you remember when to start working on a task.

Sometimes it's hard to know what to do next, even with lists of tasks and due dates. Instead of showing all of the tasks due today, Microsoft To-Do gives you a clean slate in the My Day list each morning so you can decide what's most important. Tap the lightbulb for suggested tasks—including due and overdue tasks, along with those Microsoft thinks you might want to do today—and build out the perfect list to get stuff done today.

Wunderlist was one of our original favorite to-do list apps—and its replacement is quickly becoming a new favorite.

Microsoft To-Do Price: Free

For a deeper look at Microsoft To-Do's features and how it compares to Wunderlist, check out our Microsoft To-Do guide.

Apple Reminders (iOS, Web, Mac)

for quick-and-simple to-dos

The simple Reminders app that comes with iPhones, iPads, and Macs might be the easiest way to keep up with things you have to do. You can add tasks, sort them into lists, drag-and-drop them to the order you want, and view them on any of your devices—or online at iCloud.com. You can even add tasks via Siri when you're in a hurry.

Want to do more? There's a lot of power hidden behind the i button on each task. You can add a due date to tasks or have it notify you about tasks at specific locations so you won't forget to pick up stuff at the store, say. Enable the calendar from the View menu and you can drag tasks to their due date. There's even a note field, and the option to share task lists with other Reminders users.

It's a really great reminders app

Apple Reminders Price: Free with Apple devices

Google Keep (Android, iOS, Web)

for a bulletin board for your tasks

You know of Google Docs and Gmail, but how about Google Keep? This newer app from Google is a board virtual sticky notes where you can add images, text notes, and lists. It's great for notes—and equally great for quick to-do lists. Add as many tasks as you need, then have Google remind you about that list when you need.

Individual lists and notes can be shared with other Google users for easy collaboration on small projects. Google Keep is built into Google Docs, too, so you can outline your next essay or list everything that needs done in a project then check those tasks off right from your document.

It's just the basics, but Google Keep's sticky note-style interface just might be to-do system you need if you're used to sticking tasks to your desk or refrigerator and want to arrange your notes and tasks together.

Google Keep Price: Free

Google Tasks (Web)

for simple tasks in Gmail and Google Calendar

There's also an even simpler to-do list lurking in your Gmail and Google Calendar account: Google Tasks. Just click the Mail button in Gmail and select Tasks, or G then K anywhere in Gmail, and a little to-do list will pop up on the right side of your screen. Or, click the Tasks calendar in Google Calendar, and you'll get a simple to-do list on the right side. Type in tasks, then click the arrow on the right to add a due date or note, or click and drag on a task to rearrange them to the order you want.

It's extremely basic, but it's also a convenient way to keep up with what you need to do in the apps you already use most. Plus, Google includes keyboard shortcuts to manage tasks in Gmail so you can add a task for an email or quickly jot down a new task from your inbox.

Google Tasks Price: Free

For a deeper look at Google Tasks features and pricing plans, check out our Google Tasks review.

See Google Tasks integrations on Zapier

Remember The Milk (Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows, Mac, Linux, Web)

for simple yet powerful task management

Remember The Milk was one of the first online to-do list apps. And with a recent redesign, the app that's helped manage tasks since the Blackberry was new is still one of the best ways to get things done.

It's still a simple tool—add your tasks, organize them in lists, and check them off when finished. Tap a task to add extra details, including tags, locations, the estimated time it'll take to finish a task, the day you should start working on it, and much more. Add Smart Lists to create search-powered lists of tasks, perhaps to group all of your tasks that are due this week and are tagged with your company's name—or anything else you want. It's powerful while still keeping things simple.

And if you still want to manage your tasks alongside your emails, you can integrate Remember The Milk with Google Calendar, Gmail, or Outlook to see all of your tasks wherever you work.

Remember The Milk Price: Free; $39/year Pro plan for reminders, unlimited sharing, themes, and offline support

For a deeper look at Remember The Milk features and pricing plans, check out our Remember The Milk review.

See Remember The Milk integrations on Zapier

Momentum (Chrome)

for simple to-dos in every New Tab

Momentum isn't really a to-do list app—it's a Chrome extension that gives you the time, a photo of the day, a daily quote, and an awesome little to-do list whenever you open a new tab in Google Chrome. The to-do list is completely bare bones—it's just a small check-list at the bottom right-hand corner that you'll see whenever you open a new tab. But, it's enough to keep track of the things you need to do most.

Then, every day when you first launch Chrome, Momentum will ask you for your daily focus—the thing you'll be working on most today. This focus will be shown on your dashboard for the rest of the day, making sure it's on your mind until the focus is completed.

Momentum Price: Free; $2.50/month Plus plan to sync tasks with Trello, Todoist, and Google Tasks, set custom backgrounds and typefaces, and add your own inspirational quotes

Focuster (Web)

for quickly scheduling your tasks

Focuster's to-do lists are simple, with just your tasks. Put everything you need to do in simple task lists on its left sidebar. You can then decide what to work on today and throughout those tasks, and drag those tasks onto the correct days and in the order you want.

Then, it's time to focus on your work. Tap the Now button, and your calendar and task lists will disappear, leaving only the task you're supposed to be doing right now and the next tasks after that to focus on today's work. Set that screen as your homepage, and you'll stay focused on the next task you need to do throughout the day.

Focuster Price: From $9.99/month Basic plan

For a deeper look at Focuster features and pricing plans, check out our Focuster review.

See Focuster integrations on Zapier

Checkvist (Web)

for outline-style tasks and keyboard shortcuts

Used to writing your tasks on paper, and want something that makes it just as easy to organize your tasks the way you want? Checkvist's plain text approach might be what you need. It prides itself as being the task manager for geeks, and with Markdown formatting and code support, it lives up to the claim—but that doesn't mean it's difficult to use. Tasks in Checkvist can be formatted using Markdown and are created using keyboard shortcuts. For example, just tap Return on your keyboard and start typing to add a new task, and add asterisks to add italic text like *this*.

To add more info to tasks, double-tap A on your keyboard to bring up the actions menu where you can add due dates and other information to tasks without leaving the keyboard. Press Tab to indent a task and turn it into a sub-task—or hold Shift and you can drag-and-drop tasks into the order you want. With its text formatting options, Checkvist can even be a good way to outline your next essay or plan larger projects.

Checkvist Price: Free; $3.90/month Pro for attachments and notifications

For a deeper look at Checkvist features and pricing plans, check out our Checkvist review.

See Checkvist integrations on Zapier

Ikiru (iOS)

for simple, paper-style task lists

Ikiru is designed for list. A new list app from the developer behind Paperless—an app we'd called "the epitome of a Grocery List app for iOS"— Ikiru keeps Paperless' focus on simple lists while adding extra features to help you manage your tasks.

You'll create lists for your tasks, and give each list an emoji-style icon to easily recognize your lists at a glance. Then add tasks, notes, and photos to sketch out what you need to do and swipe right on a task to mark it as completed. Want to share your tasks? Ikiru can email a plain text copy to your colleague that they can import into Ikiru, too.

You can still download Paperless if you'd like just plain lists of tasks. But for a newer design, task reminders, and light/dark themes, Ikiru is one of the best ways to manage tasks in a paper-style list.

Ikiru Price: $4.99

MinimaList (iOS)

for a plain task list that keeps you focused

Want something simple to list the things you need to do? You can get much simpler than MinimaList. Similar to the now non-supported Clear app, MinimaList gives you a plain list of tasks that you can scratch off with a swipe. Pull down on the top of the screen to add a new task—and optionally include a due date to get notified about that task.

MinimaList can also keep you focused on your most important tasks. Just tap one task, and you'll get a full-screen pomodoro timer so you'll keep working on that one thing—and take a break every so often to stay refreshed.

MinimaList Price: Free

I Done This (Web)

for a list of everything you've done

It's supposed to track the tasks you've already done. But I Done This is also a great tool to simply track the stuff you have to do—and then keep a log of those completed tasks as well.

Each day, start out by listing the things you need to do as tasks. Check them off throughout the day and add any other done tasks to track the things you accomplished outside your to-do list. If anything's left over today or keeping you from getting things done, you can list those as well.

Then you can look back over everything you've done for a detailed log of your productivity. It's a unique way to list your tasks that nudges you to get more done.

I Done This Price: Free for personal use; from $12.50/month per user Standard plan for unlimited team members and 3 integrations

For a deeper look at I Done This features and pricing plans, check out our I Done This review.

See I Done This integrations on Zapier

Swipes (Android, iOS, Web, Mac)

for snoozing tasks until you're ready to do them

You're likely to spend more time adding tasks to your to-do list than checking them off—but not with Swipes. This Evernote and Gmail-powered to-do list lets you import your Evernote notes that have reminders attached to them and turn your Gmail emails into tasks. Or, you can type in your own notes as normal.

Each of those tasks might not be detailed enough—you might need to look up info before replying to a Gmail email, and your Evernote reminder might be for a full project. Just add sub-tasks to any tasks' page in Swipes to keep track of everything in one place. It makes each task feel like a mini project that's easy to check off in steps.

You'll likely end up with more than you can get done today, so Swipes also takes a page from Mailbox and other newer email apps with a snooze button that pushes your tasks off until tomorrow or another day when you're ready to complete them. Then, when you get your lists cleared out, Swipes will help you celebrate and tells you how many days in a row you've completed all of your tasks.

Swipes Price: Free personal edition; Premium edition for $4.99/month coming soon

TeuxDeux (iOS, Web)

for a daily list of tasks

Your tasks don't all need done today—you likely have things you need to do every day this week. TeuxDeux is a simple todo list that makes it easy to keep your entire week's work organized. Just type in simple tasks on the day of the week that task needs done, and that's it. You won't need to tap anything else to schedule the task—it's already listed on the day it needs done.

And then, if you don't get everything done, don't worry. You can just drag the task to the next day's column. Or, you can add the text "every day" to any text, and it'll automatically turn into a repeating task.

TeuxDeux Price: $3/month

SomTodo (Android, iOS, Web)

for tasks with folder organization

SomTodo makes sure you don't forget about your simpler tasks, while still help you keep track of your projects and the things you need at the store. It shows your unsorted tasks in a list right at the front, with folders of your other tasks listed above. Those folders can include anything from simple tasks like your grocery list to detailed tasks with notes, reminders, and due dates.

And if you need to make sure you don't forget one of those tasks in a folder, just add a star and it'll show up on the front screen, too.

Somtodo Price: Free; $3.99/month Premium for extra storage and more

CARROT (iOS)

for turning tasks into a game

CARROT is perfect for those who need a push to complete tasks. Dubbed as the "to-do list with a personality," CARROT rewards you when you finish tasks with new features, "fortune cookies," and more. Slack off however, and CARROT gets upset, taking away points and giving you borderline sadistic "rewards."

As far as actual task management goes, CARROT is extremely simple. There are no lists and no subtasks—just a pen-and-paper style to-do list. After reaching level 18, you'll unlock the ability to add due dates and reminders to your tasks, making for more practical task management. You'll just have to make sure you're being productive for a while if you really want those features.

CARROT Price: $2.99; in-app purchases available from $0.99 each to add themes, sounds, icons, and more

Due (iOS, Mac)

for a detailed time-table for tasks

The most important part of your tasks may be their due date, so Due makes adding a due date and time to your task as simple as making the task in the first place. You'll type in your task and describe when it's due, perhaps Buy travel insurance tomorrow at noon, and Due will do the rest. It'll then show all of your tasks in a timeline where you can quickly peek at what's due today, tomorrow, and the rest of the week.

Due supports recurring tasks, so you'll always be reminded to pay your rent and get your haircut on time. And if you also need help remembering how long you need to boil eggs or wait for laundry, you can use Due's preset timers instead of setting a new timer on your phone each time.

Due Price: $4.99 for iOS; $9.99 for Mac

Moleskine Timepage (iOS)

for a to-do list style calendar

From the popular notebook brand, Moleskine Timepage turns your calendar into a to-do list of sorts. Instead of listing your tasks, you'll schedule everything that needs done. Timepage then turns those details into a detailed plan for your week's work.

It's not just your tasks, either. Moleskine Timepage can watch the weather, traffic, timezones, and more, and work them into your schedule so you'll know when to leave for a meeting early and when it's safe to leave the umbrella at home. It'll force you to think about the time when you'll do your work—and make sure you don't overschedule your day.

Moleskine Timepage Price: $4.99 for iPhone; $6.99 for iPad

Any.do (Android, iOS, Web, Mac)

for quickly organizing tasks into groups

For a more feature-filled take on the Grocery List method, Any.do is a great cross-platform task management app. You can organize tasks in two different ways: By due date or by category. When organizing by due date, it gives you four separate lists: Today, Tomorrow, Upcoming, and Someday. Then, with categories, you can add your own categories to organize tasks, in addition to the built-in Personal, Work, and Store categories.

You can see all of those lists on the same page, for a quick way to peek at your week's agenda or glance across all of your projects. With a Premium plan, you can then share your lists with others and get reminded when you're near a location that a task needs completed. You'll also soon be able to use Any.do's Assistant tool to get a personal assistant to help you out with your tasks, right from your to-do list.

Any.do Price: Free; $2.99/month Premium for location reminders, recurring tasks, and unlimited attachments

Asana (Android, iOS, Web)

for a simple approach to personal and team tasks

Asana is designed to manage your team tasks—but it can be just as good at being your personal to-do list app. It's a simple, grocery list-style app that's packed with features to keep you productive. Just write your tasks in simple project lists, and create new teams to organize your work and home projects separately, say.

You'll then see what you need to work on from the My Tasks page, which lists everything you need to do today, soon, and after that. There's also a boards view for a kanban-style way of organizing your tasks, for a simple list when you want it and a detailed planning view for more complicated projects.

Asana Price: Free core features with up to 15 team members; from $9.99/month per user Premium plan for unlimited team members and private projects

For a deeper look at Asana features and pricing plans, check out our Asana review.

See Asana integrations on Zapier

Getting Things Done (GTD) Apps

The original 5 steps of the GTD process

Need more than just a simple list of tasks? Want more ways to organize your workflow and manage a wide range of projects? A Getting Things Done app may be just what you need. These apps, which follow a task management method popularized by a book with the same name, help manage every single thing in your life. The idea is, you clear everything out of your head—random ideas, household chores, errands, along with each task in your larger work projects—and put it in the app, so you won't worry about forgetting anything. That frees up your mind to focus on the task at hand.

Start out with our detailed guide to getting started with Getting Things Done—or GTD, as it's commonly known. Then, try out one of these apps to get yourself more organized than ever.

The 12 Best GTD Apps

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
OmniFocus	managing every aspect of your tasks and projects	$39.99	iOS, Mac
Things	organized projects and a list of today's tasks	$9.99; $49.99	iOS, Mac
Todoist	GTD that works everywhere	Free; $28.99/yr. Premium	Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac
Toodledo	outlining your tasks	Free; From $16.99/yr. Silver; $3.99 iOS	Android, iOS, Web
2Do	GTD that works the way you want	Free; $19.99 Pro; $49.99 Mac	Android, iOS, Mac
TickTick	simple tasks and subtasks	Free; $2.79/mo. Pro	Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac
Todo Cloud	collaboration with full GTD features	Free; $1.99/mo. Cloud	Android, iOS, Web, Mac
Firetask	organizing lots of ideas	$5.99; $39.99	iOS, Mac
Doit.im	goal-oriented tasks with reports	Free; $2/mo. Pro	Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac
Nozbe	productivity on every platform	Free; $10/mo. Pro	Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac, Linux
The Hit List	timing your work	$19.99; $49.99	iOS, Mac
GoodTask	turning Reminders into a GTD app	Free; $4.99 Pro; $19.99 Mac	iOS, Mac

OmniFocus (iOS, Mac)

for managing every aspect of your tasks and projects

OmniFocus is one of the best-known Getting Things Done apps for Mac—and for good reason. Starting out as a customization of its sister app, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus has over a decade's legacy in managing tasks. Tasks are organized by project and context, and can be organized in a project based on their order, priority, and more.

OmniFocus includes several "perspectives" to view your tasks and projects in different ways. There's Project, Context, and Flagged views to show tasks organized in their categories, and you can add your own perspectives to show tasks from, say, just certain projects or due date ranges. Then, the Forecast perspective shows all of your tasks ordered by due dates alongside your calendar events, making it easy to plan tasks around events and get a quick look at the day ahead.

Tasks in OmniFocus can have plenty of features, too, from advanced repeating schedules to location awareness. Projects can be set to only show tasks as due when earlier tasks are completed, so you can always know what needs to be done in order. OmniFocus has AppleScript support as well, so you can automate your task management or integrate with your other Mac apps. There's even a Review view to let you look back over your projects and see how productive you've been or what you've missed. It's a detailed app—so start out with our in-depth OmniFocus guide—with enough features to manage any workflow.

OmniFocus Price: From $39.99 Standard edition for iOS and Mac each

For a deeper look at OmniFocus features and pricing plans, check out our OmniFocus review.

See OmniFocus integrations on Zapier

Things (iOS, Mac)

for organized projects and a list of today's tasks

If OmniFocus looks like feature overload to you, Things may be a better option. It's a simpler take on task management with a new design that helps you organize tasks into projects and pick what to focus on each day.

Things is built around projects, with a name and description at the top to keep the most important details together, a status circle that shows how much of the project is completed, and task sections to organize your work into groups. Add sub-tasks and comments on tasks for even more detail—then click away and Things will show just your clear task list, hiding the extras away until you need them.

You can pop the project out into its own window to check off tasks one after the other. Or, tap the Today button on the task to build up a list of things you need to do today—or schedule tasks, and they'll show up in order on your Someday list so you'll know what's coming up. And when everything's done, you can peek back at your projects to see what you finished, when.

Things Price: $9.99 iPhone, iPad $19.99; $49.99 Mac

Todoist (Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac)

for GTD that works everywhere

Todoist is a another simpler take on Getting Things Done, one that works everywhere. Tasks are organized into projects in Todoist, and you can drag-and-drop your projects and tasks into the hierarchy you want to keep tasks neat. You can then see all of your upcoming tasks in the Today and Next 7 Days views for a quick look at what you need to be doing. And, you can quickly add those dates to your tasks with Todoist's natural language processing.

Todoist looks a bit like a grocery-style to-do list at first glance, with extra productivity features hidden just below the surface. You can add labels to tasks, tag them with color-coded priorities, organize them with dynamic filters, and set separate reminders and due dates so you don't forget to start on a task. Work in a team? You can delegate tasks, and share lists with your team with Todoist Business. Then, there's Todoist Karma which will reward you for productivity with a score at the top of the app that'll challenge you to get more done each day.

It's a simplified way to get things done without distraction.

Todoist Price: Free; $28.99/year Premium for notes, project templates, mobile reminders, and location alerts

For a deeper look at Todoist features and pricing plans, check out our Todoist review.

See Todoist integrations on Zapier

Toodledo (Android, iOS, Web)

for outlining your tasks

Your tasks and projects are rather similar to an outline, so Toodledo lets you manage your tasks on one page with outline-style formatting. Projects turn into section headers, with your tasks and sub-tasks nestled underneath—and you can collapse sections to help you focus on the most important things.

Prefer a traditional tasks view? Toodledo includes one as well, along with the project and organization features you need for a full GTD workflow. There's also a notes and table view, to keep track of your text notes, finances, and more all in one productivity app. It's a simple, text-focused way to get things done.

Toodledo Price: Free; from $16.99/year Silver plan for collaboration, subtasks, and more; $3.99 for iOS app

For a deeper look at Toodledo features and pricing plans, check out our Toodledo review.

See Toodledo integrations on Zapier

2Do (Android, iOS, Mac)

for GTD that works the way you want

2Do started out as just a mobile app—but has turned into one of the most feature-packed GTD apps, one that MacStories founder Federico Viticci called his favorite iOS task manager. Instead of forcing you to focus on due dates, projects, or contexts as most GTD apps do, 2Do lets you choose how you want to work and what to focus on. With two sidebars—one for projects, another for tags—you can quickly browse your tasks and find what you need to do next.

It also includes unique features that aren't often found in other apps. There's a task duration setting where you can estimate how long each task will take, batch edits to cleanup your tasks quickly, focus to show only the most important tasks, privacy settings, and much more.

You likely don't usually think too much about how you sync your tasks, but if you'd like the flexibility to pick, 2Do is a great option to choose. It can sync your tasks via Dropbox, or using any CalDAV server so you can also see your tasks inside your standard calendar app. Or, if you use Toodledo with your team, you can sync 2Do with it to keep track of your personal and work tasks together.

2Do Price: Free for iOS and Android; $19.99 Pro mobile version for sync; $49.99 Mac app

TickTick (Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac)

for simple tasks and subtasks

GTD apps don't have to be complicated with projects and contexts and more. TickTack packs the power of a GTD tool into an app that's as easy to use as a Grocery List style app. Just list your tasks, then tap any of the more complex tasks to add subtasks—and that task is instantly turned into a project. And that's it: Your tasks and subtasks in one, easy-to-read list.

That's not all it can do, of course. Add sub-tasks to your tasks, and they'll be organized based on their due date automatically. Or, you can see your week at a glance with a list of all the tasks that are due this week. And if you need to do the same tasks repeatedly, there's a simple repeating tasks tools to help you out.

TickTick Price: Free; $2.79/month Pro plan for unlimited lists, revision history, and calendar view

Todo Cloud (Android, iOS, Web, Mac)

for collaboration with full GTD features

Appigo's Todo is one of the original Getting Things Done apps. Originally built around stand-alone apps, the latest version of Todo is built around a cloud service to keep your tasks synced. Tasks in Todo can be organized by list, context, or tag—all of which can be tweaked as you need. It also has a built-in All Tasks list that gives you a quick look at everything you've added.

Most apps let you add notes, due dates, and more to your tasks—and in Todo, you get those features in sub-tasks, too. That way, you can organize everything into projects, tasks, and subtasks, each with enough info to get everything done.

Todo Cloud Price: Free; $1.99/month Cloud plan for smart lists, notifications, and location reminder

Firetask (iOS, Mac)

for organizing lots of ideas

Firetask helps you quickly organize everything you need to do with its Organize and Scratchboard views. The Organize view gives you a glance at everything you need to finish. Tasks are organized by what's due today and tomorrow, as well as what's coming up in the future. It's great for big picture thinkers, as it gives you an overview of what needs to be finished over multiple periods of time.

Then, the Scratchboard is, in short, a digital whiteboard. It's a space where you can jot down quick tasks or ideas—a great place to brainstorm future projects, or even write a quick grocery list. And if those tasks end up taking more time, just add them to a project to keep your Scratchboard cleared out.

Firetask Price: $5.99 iPhone; $7.99 iPad; $39.99 Mac

Doit.im (Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac)

for goal-oriented tasks with reports

Like most GTD tools, Doit.im lets you sort your tasks into project and add due dates to organize your work by time. Then, its unique Goals tool lets you track your progress towards larger goals you've set. You could list your business quarterly goals, or personal growth goals like learning a new skill. You can then add tasks to both a Project and a Goal, to organize your tasks and also see how they help you achieve your broad goals.

Doit also has a unique performance feature that gives you insight into how much work you've completed in a given day. It includes a pie chart with your tasks broken down by what has been completed, uncompleted, and deferred, where you can comment and rate your progress to journal your productivity.

Doit Price: Free; $2/month Pro plan for desktop apps, goals, and subtasks

Nozbe (Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac, Linux)

for productivity on every platform

GTD apps help you keep track of everything, but sometimes that can lead to information overload. Your tasks will be in projects and have contexts, locations and more included, but that's only valuable if you can see it. Nozbe makes sure your tasks' projects are obvious with color-coded project labels and context icons that make your tasks easy to understand at a glance.

Nozbe works everywhere you do, with apps for everything including Linux and integrations with Evernote, Dropbox, Google Calendar and more. You can even use all of its features with your team, if you'd like, for GTD productivity in everything you're working on.

Nozbe Price: Free; $10/month Pro plan for 2 members and unlimited project

For a deeper look at Nozbe features and pricing plans, check out our Nozbe review.

See Nozbe integrations on Zapier

The Hit List (iOS, Mac)

for timing your work

The Hit List's designers know that your tasks and projects are complicated and will take time to complete, so they've designed their app to help you track everything and focus on just what you're working on right now. You'll find the standard features to list your tasks—along with the amount of time you expect them to take to complete—and organize them into lists and projects.

Then, you can select just one task to work on, and you'll see it full-screen with a large space for notes where you can plan out your work in detail. There's a timer as well, so you can keep track of how long you actually took on that task and see your task's progress at a glance.

The Hit List Price: $19.99 iOS; $49.99 Mac

GoodTask (iOS, Mac)

for turning Reminders into a GTD app

Apple Reminders is a great simple to-do list app, but it can be so much more. GoodTask takes Reminders' basic features—and free iCloud syncing—and adds enough tools to turn it into a full GTD app. You can organize your tasks on a calendar, so you can see your events and tasks in one view, and list them in detailed projects with tags and smart lists to keep things organized.

GoodTask can keep track of your recurring tasks, even showing how many times you've completed them so far. It includes color-coded labels so you'll know which project a task is in at a glance, and let you search to find the tasks you need to work on. And if you ever need to check your tasks from a browser, just open the Reminders app in iCloud.com to see everything you've added to GoodTask.

GoodTask Price: Free for iOS; $4.99 for Pro iOS app; $19.99 Mac

Kanban Board Apps

The Kanban method keeps your tasks and progress in plain sight.

Your tasks aren't always simple enough to fit into a simple to-do list, and they might not fit into the more rigid projects and contexts of a GTD app. For something more free-form, flexible, and graphical, the paper-notes-on-a-bulletin-board inspired kanban apps might be the best solution.

Where most other to-do list apps put your tasks into a single column list, kanban board apps give you multiple lists on a single page with your tasks on "cards" that you can move between the lists. You can use those lists to make a workflow for your task, perhaps with To-do, Doing, and Done lists or more detailed workflows to see exactly where each task stands.

Kanban is a project management system that was developed to keep Toyota's factories running smoothly—and it can be just as helpful for your personal tasks. Get started by reading our guide to Kanban task management, then try one of these apps to turn your to-do list into a workflow.

The 5 Best Personal Kanban Board Apps

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
Trello	simple kanban productivity everywhere	Free; $5/mo. Gold	Android, iOS, Windows, Web
MeisterTask	turning mindmaps and brainstorms into projects	Free; $90/yr. Pro	Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web
Week Plan	your whole week's tasks at a glance	Free; $67/yr. Pro	Android, iOS, Web
LeanKit	free-form kanban boards	Free; $19/mo. Select	Android, iOS, Web
KanbanFlow	simple subtasks in kanban	Free; $5/mo. Premium	Web

Trello (Android, iOS, Windows, Web)

for simple kanban productivity everywhere

If there's one app responsible for popularizing kanban board productivity, it's Trello. It's a new take on kanban boards that's easy to use and customizable, with a generous free plan. You'll start out with a demo board that includes sample columns and cards to help you get the idea of how to use it. Then, you can customize your columns for your workflow, add cards with everything you need to do, and even pick a background color or photo to liven up your work.

It's simple, but each card packs a lot of power. You can add descriptions and comments to tasks with markdown formatting, along with subtasks, attachments, and color coded cards. And you can bring along your entire team to collaborate—something that Trello's low price of free makes even easier.

Trello Price: Free; $5/month Gold for extra power-ups, storage, and custom backgrounds

For a deeper look at Trello features and pricing plans, check out our Trello review.

See Trello integrations on Zapier

MeisterTask (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Web)

for turning mindmaps and brainstorms into projects

Your tasks don't start out as tasks—they start out as ideas, things you jot down on a napkin and brainstorm with your team. MeisterTask, part of the MindMeister family of apps, can turn your mindmaps into projects to make it easy to turn your ideas into reality.

MeisterTask also helps you get work done faster. Each list in your kanban boards can include section actions, which assign tasks to team members, send a message, or trigger an integration that can get work done for you. Instead of having to check off tasks and followup on them, just move tasks to the next column and MeisterTask will handle the rest.

MeisterTask Price: Free Basic plan; from $90/year per user Pro plan for section actions and unlimited integrations

For a deeper look at MeisterTask features and pricing plans, check out our MeisterTask review.

See MeisterTask integrations on Zapier

Week Plan (Android, iOS, Web)

for your whole week's tasks at a glance

Your tasks aren't only due today—they stretch out into the week ahead, and beyond. Week Plan helps you plan for it all with an at-a-glance look at your tasks for four days at a time. Each day gets a list of tasks, along with your appointments synced in from Google Calendar, so you'll know what's going on the whole week. And, there are extra lists below where you can store your projects and shared tasks—along with a Pending list on the side for tasks you haven't scheduled yet.

It's a unique take on Kanban boards that help you both sort tasks into lists and workflows and keep your week's schedule in mind at the same time.

Week Plan Price: Free core features; from $67/year Pro plan for 3 premium features of your choice

For a deeper look at Week Plan features and pricing plans, check out our Week Plan review.

See Week Plan integrations on Zapier

LeanKit (Android, iOS, Web)

for free-form kanban boards

GTD apps have projects, lists, and subtasks, but kanban apps usually only have one level of organization for your tasks. LeanKit, however, lets you make kanban work the way you want. You can customize how many columns each of your lists have, and add sub-columns to keep everything organized. You can even collapse columns with tasks you're not currently working on, add graphical tags to get more info about your tasks at a glance.

Lists aren't the best way to manage everything, so LeanKit also includes a calendar view where you can organize your tasks based on their due date or project duration. It even tracks statistics about what's been completed, and give you reports on your productivity and work progress.

LeanKit Price: Free Lite edition for two boards; from $19/month per user Select plan for unlimited boards

For a deeper look at LeanKit features and pricing plans, check out our LeanKit review.

See LeanKit integrations on Zapier

KanbanFlow (Web)

for simple subtasks in kanban

All Kanban apps are designed to help you visualize your work, but KanbanFlow goes further by letting you show your tasks along with their notes and subtasks together. You can customize each column's view to automatically show or hide subtasks, or tap on a card to see and edit any of its info.

Then, KanbanFlow includes another tool to help you stay productive: A pomodoro timer. It times your work, reminds you to take a break every so often, and logs the total amount of time you've spent on tasks. You can even keep up with the things that interrupted your work, and see reports of your productivity at the end of the month.

KanbanFlow Price: Free; $5/month Premium for swimlanes, attachments, and search

For a deeper look at KanbanFlow features and pricing plans, check out our KanbanFlow review.

See KanbanFlow integrations on Zapier

Plain Text Apps

You can use Todo.txt to manage tasks in a text editor or a dedicated app

Ever typed a quick list of the things you need to do in Notepad or the Notes app on your phone? That's plain text task management, one of the simplest and most flexible ways to keep track of your tasks.

You likely already have a favorite text editor like Notepad or Sublime Text, writing app like iA Writer or Byword, or notes app like Evernote or OneNote. Those are all you need to quickly manage tasks just like you would on a plain sheet of paper.

The 4 Best Plain Text To-Do List Apps

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
Todo.txt	text-based to-do lists everywhere	Free; $1.99	Android, iOS, any text editor
Evernote	turning notes into to-dos with reminders	Free; $3.99/mo. Plus	Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac
Notion	projects built into documents	Free; $8/mo. Plus	Windows, Mac, Web
OneNote	notes and tasks on virtual paper	Free; $6.99/mo. Office 365	Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac

Todo.txt (Android, iOS, any text editor)

for text-based to-do lists everywhere

You can write down your to-dos in any text editor on your computer, but adding tasks in a writing app on mobile can be a pain. Todo.txt fixes this with a standard task formatting syntax and app that sync your text tasks to your phone via Dropbox.

Just follow the Todo.txt syntax when writing your tasks to include the due date, priority, and task name, such as (A) 2011-03-02 Call Mom.

Then, import your to-do list to a Todo.txt app, and that text list will turn into a to-do list that looks like most simple Grocery List-style to-do lists, complete with swipe-to-finish and other features. You can add text-based tags and contexts, sync your changes to your computer, and even use a companion command line app in terminal to manage text tasks on the big screen. The core apps haven't been updated in several years, though community apps—and its core syntax in a plain text writing app—live on.

Todo.txt Price: Free; $1.99

Evernote (Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac)

for turning notes into to-dos with reminders

Evernote is a notes app that does everything, and it works surprisingly well as a task manager. You can write notes about anything—including the things you need to do—and can add checkboxes to lists in notes to make for a more interactive text-based to-do list. Or, you can add a Reminder to any note to turn it into a task with a due date.

Just make a note about anything you need to do, dragging in related documents and more. Then click the alarm clock icon and set a time to be reminded. That lets you turn Evernote into a to-do list app, one that'll send you a notification when it needs completed.

Then, if you want to take this idea even further, create a new notebook solely for notes tagged with Reminders—or use multiple notebooks and tags to organize tasks like a GTD app—and you have a full-featured Evernote task manager.

Evernote Price: Free; from $3.99/month Plus plan for unlimited devices, offline notes, and additional storage

For a deeper look at Evernote features and pricing plans, check out our Evernote review.

See Evernote integrations on Zapier

Notion (Windows, Mac, Web)

for projects built into documents

Notion literally puts everything on the same page, with a new take on digital documents that include text, lists, media, web pages, files, discussions, and project boards. You could list your tasks in a standard checklist, much like other plain text to-do list apps. Or, you can add drag those task lists into multiple columns for your own text-powered kanban board.

Need to dive further into an idea? You can turn anything—a task name, header, and more—into a new document in a click, where the original text is linked to that new document, wiki-style. It's a great way to expand on your ideas, brainstorm with a team, and turn it all into actionable tasks that everyone can work on.

Notion Price: Free personal plan for up to 200 content blocks and 3 day history; from $8/month per user Pro plan for unlimited collaborators, content blocks, and history

OneNote (Android, iOS, Windows, Web, Mac)

for notes and tasks on virtual paper

OneNote is a free notes app that's bundled with Microsoft Office that feels more like a paper notebook than anything digital. You can write free-form notes, clicking anywhere on the virtual paper to add additional details—a great way to make a to-do list with as many details as you need. It can recognize text from images, organize your notes in notebooks and sections just as you would with paper notes, and sort your notes with emoji-style icons.

For tasks, you'll just make standard lists with a checkbox to mark them as complete. That's less than you might get from another task management app, but with more tools to organize your content and add extra details with OneNote's core note features.

OneNote Price: Free; included with Office 365 from $6.99/month.

For a deeper look at OneNote features and pricing plans, check out our OneNote review.

See OneNote integrations on Zapier

How to Automate Your To-Do App and Integrate it With Your Workflow

Don't type in everything you need to do—let Zapier create tasks automatically

Once you've found the perfect to-do app, Zapier's the tool you need to make that app fit into your workflow. With its app integrations, Zapier can automatically add tasks to your to-do list, get reminded about new tasks, and kick off workflows to fill template documents, create projects, and send notifications when you finish a task.

Say you want to turn your emails and chat messages into tasks automatically. Zapier can watch Gmail and Slack, say, for starred messages—so just star any message and Zapier will add them to your to-do list.

Maybe your team uses one project or to-do list app, while you manage your personal tasks in another. Zapier can link the two together, adding any tasks that are assigned to you in the team app to your personal to-do list.

Or, you could get work done just by checking off your task. Zapier can watch for completed tasks, then send an email or fill out a template document as soon as you check off a finished task.

Zapier includes a wide range of to-do list apps and project management integrations—and if your app isn't supported, you can likely use Zapier's email integration to send tasks to your to-do list app's own email integration. Here are some popular to-do list automations to help you get started—or go make your own Zapier integrations to get more work done in less time:

Create Tasks Automatically

Tasks come in from everywhere: Emails, conversations, forms, sales, and more. Don't copy and paste each new item. Zapier can turn those things into tasks for you.

Move Tasks Between To-Do Apps

Whether your team uses multiple apps to organize tasks, or you want to move team tasks to your personal app, Zapier can put your new tasks where you're most likely to see them.

Schedule Tasks on Your Calendar

Your calendar already has all of your appointments and meetings, so make sure you don't double-book anything by having Zapier add your tasks to your calendar. It can even log completed tasks for a record of what you've accomplished over time.

Get Work Done From Your To-Do List

Kick off a new project. Send your team a message. Fill in a spreadsheet. Zapier can do the next job for you—all you have to do is check off the task.

Other Ways to Manage Your Tasks

Not finding an app that fits your task management approach? Or have you tried each of these types of apps, but still want something different? Don't worry: There are hundreds of other apps out there for you.

Perhaps a standard to-do list app isn't for you; you need some other way to get things done. Your calendar could double as a way to manage your tasks, listing the most important things you have to do as events—and that'd help keep you from overbooking your schedule. Or, gamify your productivity with apps like Habit RPG (pictured above) that giving you little rewards to encourage you to get things done.
And, you'll find new to-do list apps all the time on the App Store, Google Play, and sites like Product Hunt.

If it's more features you're looking for, you might find that a project management app that's great for your personal tasks. Tools like Avaza would help you manage freelance tasks, say, while tools like Podio could help you build a workflow for your work. They may be primarily designed for teams, but can still be an effective way to keep up with your personal projects (and are a great way to keep personal and team tasks together, too).

Or, maybe you'll ultimately find you're most productive away from all the technology. Try just going back to what you relied on in grade school: a pen and notepad. Either way you go though—with a to-do list app or without one—there are plenty of options to keep track of your tasks and help you be more productive.

Bonus: Download a Personal To-do List App Cheat Sheet

Want a quick way to reference all of the apps listed in this article? We've put together a brand new cheat sheet PDF for this roundup with each of the 40 apps along with their best features, pricing, and supported platforms. It's a great way to share this list of apps with your friends and team members, or to find a new app to try out on your own later.

What app keeps you productive? We'd love to hear more about your favorite to-do list app in the comments below!

Continue Reading

A shiny new to-do list app isn't the only thing you need to stay productive. Here are some extra guides from the Zapier team to help you find the perfect productivity system for your needs—and stick to it:

Start out with our guide to task management styles to figure out the best way to manage your tasks.
Think GTD and other more complicated to-do list methods look too complicated? Check these 5 simple GTD alternatives for ways to build a simpler workflow in a simple, grocery style to-do list app.
Then, read our guide to stress-free productivity to find out how to make to-do lists work for you.

Zapier marketers Danny Schreiber and Matthew Guay contributed to this original article and its updated edition.

25+ Fully Remote Companies That Let You Work From Anywhere

melanie.pinola@zapier.com (Melanie Pinola) — Thu, 18 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

High-speed internet and powerful apps make it possible for just about anyone with a desk job to work from home. Yet today most companies still insist that employees endure the sometimes soul-crushing commute to an office.

We get it. Face time is important: great for team-building, collaboration, and navigating the nuances of communication. However, as the companies below demonstrate, you don't need a physical office to be successful.

In fact, one might argue that going fully remote with a 100% distributed team–with no company offices at all–actually makes businesses more successful. Hire the best talent (wherever they are), eliminate expensive office overhead and distractions, and play a big part in reducing our carbon footprint. As Automattic's Matt Wullenweg has said:

We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can in the world. And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.

Companies as large as Microsoft and as fast-growing as Slack allow team members to work remotely, if needed. But that could lead to missing out on a remote environment's best benefits. With no headquarters or corporate offices, completely remote teams keep everyone on the same playing field, avoiding the unequal balances of power that can easily arise if some of the team still works in the office.

Companies that offer remote work care most about what team members produce–not whether they're in the same room together. And they trust their employees to do their best work even if no one's looking over their shoulders.

If you're thinking of upgrading your job to one that gives you more time in your day and supports better work/life balance, consider the 25+ companies below who have fully embraced the remote work way of life. They're hiring for tech jobs, as well as roles in marketing, customer service, project management, and other positions. You might want to bookmark this list for future reference in your next job hunt!

10up

"The best talent isn’t found in a single zip code, and an international clientele requires a global perspective."

Web design and development consulting service 10up describes their 120+ person team as "one big happy family"–a family that's distributed worldwide and stays connected with Slack, Google Hangout, and plain old text.

If you're looking for a remote job in web strategy, design, and engineering, take a look at 10up. You can apply even if you don't see a current opening: The company says they're always looking for talented strategists, project managers, engineers, designers, systems administrators, and advertising specialists.

See 10up job openings

Arkency

"We have a set of tools to make this kind of working possible. You won’t miss anything important even if you’re working in weird hours. In fact, some of us do."

Arkency is a consulting agency that builds business software, trains programmers, and produces books and webinars. They're always hiring talented coders who communicate well and can prioritize their work (both invaluable skills for remote workers). And they've built a culture and environment to help distributed team members thrive, centered around the concepts of "anarchy, async, and remote":

Anarchy means flexible work hours, choosing your own priorities and coming up with the initiative (we love that!). Remote means you are working from everywhere in the world - home, your coworking office, whatever. And async means all communication is not meant to be done instantly - we avoid meetings and long discussions.

In fact, Arkency founder Andrzej Krzywda told us that "More than remote, we value async, which means work at any time you prefer. The whole process is constructed around it. Asyc/remote is part of our DNA. I think it's now part of our lifestyle too. There's a lot of freedom with such approach."

The company welcomes you to contact them if you have the programming skillsets they're looking for. In addition to flexibility, one unusual perk employees enjoy is access to a team server for Civilization 5 games, also available for other async teams.

Visit Arkency's hiring page

Articulate

"Work where, when, and how you want. There's no corporate office, no corporate B.S. Nothing between you and your best work."

Software development company Articulate creates tools to author e-learning courses for the web and mobile. Founded in 2002, Articulate's main operating principle is to empower its employees–and a big part of that is allowing staff to work wherever they want. Along with telecommuting, the company offers an equipment and technology stipend for setting up a home office, flexible paid time off, and annual retreats.

As of this writing, Articulate is looking to hire web and macOS developers, as well as a site reliability engineer.

See Articulate job openings

Automattic

"We care about the work you produce, not the hours you put in. "

You've likely used or at least heard of one of the apps Automattic has produced. The team is the genius behind WordPress.com, Longreads, Simplenote, Gravatar, Polldaddy, and other tools many rely on day-in and day-out. "Automatticians" work from anywhere they want, and their current team of nearly 500 employees are located in over 50 countries. So how do they do it? Automattic Happiness Engineer Andrew Spittle shared with us:

To wrangle all those timezones we rely on Slack alongside a network of real-time blogs running the P2 theme. It can feel like chaos at times, but it works well for us. Text is our predominant communication mode and we look for strong writing skills in applicants. On the support side that’s key since text is not just how we communicate with customers but also with each other. Our interview process is all done through text chats, too, as a way to evaluate that ability.

Automattic is currently hiring for over a dozen positions in the engineering, business, product, marketing, and support departments. Employees enjoy an annual week-long retreat and department retreats, paid sabbaticals every five years, home office and coworking allowances, and an open vacation policy.

See Automattic job openings

Buffer

"At Buffer, we’ve experimented with new elements of work: titles and no titles, managers and no managers, office and no office. We don’t work on a fixed schedule or from a fixed location."

Buffer is also a fully distributed team, with more than 80 employees working in several different countries (see this employee timezones map, which is pretty interesting). The company's social media management tools are used by over 60,000 paying customers (including Zapier) because it makes sharing on social networks a breeze.

Courtney Seiter, Buffer's Inclusivity Catalyst, shares that instead of having a hybrid remote and on-site environment, Buffer "does everything 100% remote first to create that feeling of inclusivity and equality across the board."

Buffer is also one of the most transparent SaaS companies, sharing hiring practices and salaries, revenue details, product roadmaps, and more on their transparency page. When you join the Buffer team, you'll know what you're getting into. In addition to telecommuting, employee perks include unlimited vacation, free books and Kindles, and annual international retreats (the last one was in Waikiki, Hawaii!).

See Buffer job openings

Edgar

"We don’t bother with office politics, both because that’s way too cliche, and also, because we don’t have an office. (So, you can wear stretchy pants to work and no one will judge.)"

Edgar is "the social media queue that fills itself." Edgar lets you add social media updates to categories in your library, then posts it according to your category-based schedule. When every update in the category has been posted, Edgar will re-post updates so more new audiences can see them.

Started in 2014, the company currently has team members spread across the US and Canada. They seem like a talented bunch of folks, too, with employees who play the ukelele, write comedic haikus, design interiors, and more. See Edgar's careers page to find an open position.

See Edgar job openings

Fire Engine RED

"Being able to hire the very best people without having to consider geographical restraints is key to our company culture – and to our clients’ continuing success."

Fire Engine RED provides marketing, technology, and data solutions to the education market. They've done so as a 100% remote company since their founding in 2001, with over 80 team members spread out over North America. Fire Engine RED has over 500 clients, including 350 admissions offices, who turn to them for student search, predictive modeling, CRM, software products, and creative and digital services.

Fire Engine RED's Communications Director Chuck Vadun shared a few interesting facts about their remote work culture. They use Skype (audio only) and Trillian Instant Messenger on a daily basis, and their team tends to be highly entrepreneurial—"thinking like owners, not employees." And employees even get to take time outs:

If needed, our employees may take up to four hours of 'out' time on a particular day – without using their vacation time. We offer 'out' time to exercise, attend school functions, pick up relatives from the airport, drop off kids at soccer practice, and more.

See Fire Engine RED job openings

FlexJobs

"Throughout our hiring process, we are specifically looking for people who are great at communicating, who are drawn to the mission-driven aspect of our company, and who show an ability to collaborate with a team, as well as work independently."

FlexJobs helps job seekers find legitimate flexible jobs–telecommuting jobs, part-time jobs, and freelance work. So it's no surprise that the company itself is 100% remote and has been from the beginning, since CEO Sara Sutton Fell founded the company while looking for flexibility in her own career.

The current FlexJobs team spans from Maine to Hawaii and crosses 6 different time zones, so they rely on tools such as Slack, Sococo, Google Apps, join.me, and Pivotal Tracker to collaborate efficiently. In addition to working from their home offices across the United States, employees enjoy unlimited vacation time, virtual fitness classes such as yoga and bellydancing, monthly happy hour trivia events, and surprise packages delivered to their homes a couple of times a year.

You'll need a FlexJobs membership ($15/month) to see opening for the company, but that also includes access to hand-screened flexible job listings from thousands of companies in over 50 career categories–and there's a satisfaction guarantee.

See FlexJobs job openings

Genuitec

"This unique environment allows us to maintain a low overhead, while attracting the most talented employees from around the globe."

Genuitec is a software development company that helps enterprises streamline their development lifecycle. A founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, they provide technologies for 16,000 companies worldwide and are a fully-distributed workforce.

The company relies on Skype for work and as a virtual water cooler, mandating status usage so team members always know when people are available or out. Genuitec telecommuters are located in the US, India, Mexico, Africa, and Europe.

See Genuitecjob openings.

GitLab

"The flexibility that remote working brings makes that we don't have to worry about living life at the end of the day. "

"The platform for modern developers," GitLab is a code collaboration platform built for the enterprise. In fact, it's used by programmers in Fortune 500 companies such as IBM and other organizations, including NASA. GitLab is also a community project.

The fully remote company has staff located in three continents. Their remote manifesto highlights the team's values, which include bonding in real life when possible and giving credit when credit's due (in a special #thanks Slack channel, even).

As of this writing, there are over a dozen open positions for engineers, product managers, account executives, and more.

See GitLab job openings

Ghost

"Our headquarters is the internet. If you have a wifi connection, we have an office near you."

Elegant blogging platform Ghost is the tool behind the publishing efforts of organizations such as NASA, Square, and Graze. Ghost is open source, free, and customizable–and created almost entirely by volunteers.

The non-profit Ghost Foundation runs and organizes Ghost, and the team of developers and other staff works online "from all corners of the internet." Benefits include flexible time off, support for personal development, office setup allowances, and meetups a few times a year.

See Ghost job openings

Groove

"We don’t have an office, and our entire team is remote. Do your work from absolutely anywhere with an internet connection."

Groove provides simple help desk software to over 4,500 small businesses. The customizable web app makes managing support tickets easy for teams. Launched 3 years ago, the company consists of 9 staff across 9 cities. And currently has 2 open positions.

What do they look for in their remote workers? Here's what CEO Alex Turnbull shared with us:

"The number one thing we look for in a remote employee is the skill of working remotely. Too many businesses who go remote don't realize that remote working is a skill, just like design or coding, and you need to hire for it. Of course, the lucky ones figure it out pretty quickly after their first few hires."

"One of the ways that we look for this skill is by asking questions like 'what does your work setup look like?' in interviews. If someone hasn’t put much thought into their setup and works from their couch 100% of the time, or worse, 'doesn’t know yet,' this signals that they might not be ready for a remote position yet."

(So set up your home office for productivity before applying!)

See Groove job openings

Hubstaff

"The company's office space is virtual and no one misses commutes or the overhead costs of having an office."

Time-tracking tool Hubstaff is used by over 8,000 remote teams to not just track time, but also help with automatic payroll processing and attendance scheduling. The company was founded in 2012 by two entrepreneurs who wanted a better way to manage remote freelancers—so it's only fitting their product is built by a remote team.

Employees enjoy both the freedom to work from anywhere and flexible hours, because Hubstaff believes remote work is the future.

Currently, Hubstaff is comprised of 10 team members and is hiring for roles in marketing, development, customer support, and PR.

See Hubstaff job openings

How-To Geek

"The best thing about being 100% distributed is that our pool of potential talent is as big as it can possibly be—there are no geographical barriers keeping us from hiring someone."

How-To Geek is an online tech magazine created by geeks for geeks. There are few tech subjects this instructional site hasn't covered in depth and in easy-to-understand language. The team is also completely remote.

Founder Lowell Heddings says:

Having a better pool of talent was really important, and really the primary reason we chose to do everything distributed. As we grew bigger, we looked at the idea of having an office, but it didn’t make a ton of sense. The reality is that Northern Virginia is extremely expensive, so hiring everybody here would cost us a fortune, and office space is really expensive… but more importantly, we never found any good writers in this area. The best ones ended up being all over the country.

The small team relies on Slack as their central communication tool and gets together usually about once a year for major events like CES.

Editor-in-Chief Whitson Gordon say that even though they're not currently in the hiring process, he's always on the lookout for potential new hires. If you join the team, you'll get benefits such as a flexible schedule, generous vacation time, and–highly unusual these days–fully paid health insurance.

Contact How-To Geek for a Writing Job

InVision

"With a distributed team, we can hire the smartest people no matter where they live and keep them if they decide to relocate. Have WiFi, can travel :) "

InVision provides a design collaboration and prototyping platform that's used by companies such as Evernote, Adobe, Airbnb, and Salesforce. With InVision, teams can design and user test products using an intuitive interface from anywhere—just how the InVision team of 220+ staffers in 14 different countries works.

Avi Posluns, InVision Director of Team Happiness shares:

Being 100% distributed is intentional and comes from the top. Our CEO Clark Valberg wants his staff to work wherever they want, whenever they want. Working remotely gives InVision team members authorship over their lives in a way many people can’t have if they’re working a tradition desk job. We place the emphasis on outcomes, not physical presence. Being remote also lets us tap into talent that isn’t limited by physical location. We’re able to bring on team members who are great at what they do regardless of where they’re located.

The startup offers broad personal medical insurance, free gym memberships, equipment allowances, conference and travel stipends, and even unlimited Starbucks drinks. Weekly checkins and anonymous surveys help ensure employees are satisfied and supported.

InVision is currently hiring for a number of positions across sales, product, and engineering departments.

See InVision job openings or learn how InVision rapidly build their remote support team.

Knack

"We’ve been 100% remote from the beginning. Every decision we’ve made has been around how to best grow a team, do amazing work, and build a lasting culture in a 100% remote environment."

Knack is a cloud-based database tool that makes it easy for anyone to manage, share, and utilize their data. Over 3,000 customers, including Harvard University and Tesla, use Knack for creating things like inventory managers and customer portals (and even a bee hive manager).

Currently a small team of 18, Knack's headquarters is the internet. The team gets together twice a year at retreats and enjoys unlimited paid vacation as well as an annual allowance for learning credits. The company says they typically hire on fit over need, so if you don't see an open position there, you're still welcome to apply if you think you're a great match.

See Knack job openings

Rocana

"Our employees live and work where they want and manage the right work/life balance for themselves. As a result, some of the most amazing and talented professionals choose to work here."

Rocana offers advanced analytic tools for IT departments. CIOs and technologists use Rocana to capture and see everything that's happening in their IT environment.

The fully distributed company employs over 50 team members, who meet quarterly in person at all sorts of locations. According to Rocana's website, the company hires talented team players (and there's a strict "no jerks" policy):

We value analytical thinking as a first class skill and believe titles are used to reflect responsibilities, not status. We hire people who care, are engaged, and strive to deliver against aggressive goals. We hire people who are passionate about helping others and seek opportunities to ask for help.

See Rocana job openings

Scrapinghub

"Open source is in our DNA, as is being 100% remote."

Web-crawling experts Scrapinghub are behind Scrapy Cloud, a cloud-based web crawling platform that helps developers gather data from bllions of web pages. They also provide web crawling services and consulting.

Founded in 2010, Scrapinghub is a globally distributed team of 130 people (many, notably, engineers) from over 40 countries. Because the company is 100% remote, employees are welcome to be digital nomads: "Ever imagined working on sponsored open source projects while traveling year-round? At Scrapinghub, you can - and some do."

Scrapinghub co-founder Pablo Hoffman shared with us:

I'm in Montevideo, Uruguay, a small country in South America. There's only so much talent available locally. The same applies for Cork, Ireland (where my partner lives) and pretty much every other city you pick in the world. You either have too little talent or too much competition for it (case of SF and the valley) that only established and well-funded companies can afford to compete. With 100% distributed workforce, you have both: a lot of talent and little competition because there's only a few companies doing 100% remote right (ie. remote-first), although more and more have been jumping into that boat since we started in 2010, leveling the competition up.

Job perks include an open vacation policy (including all local country holidays), a computer equipment allowance, and paid subscriptions to online courses for career development.

See Scrapinghub job openings

Doist

"We are designers, engineers, and communicators united by a common goal, not a common location."

Doist is the team behind Todoist, a popular productivity app that helps millions of people manage their tasks and projects. Todoist sports a distraction-free, minimalist design and is available as a web app, desktop app, mobile app, and browser extension. Doist has been around since 2007, and their team members are spread across 20 different countries.

Doist’s founder and CEO, Amir Salihefendic, says in an interview with Fast Company that Doist became a remote company out of necessity–to find and retain talent–but also that "a product stands a better chance of resonating with a global workforce when it's created by people around the world." So not only is Doist a fully distributed team, they're also making tools to help other remote teams succeed.

Doist job perks include 25 paid days of vacation a year (in addition to national holidays and an awesome maternity/paternity leave policy), a generous hardware/software budget, perks that focus on employee’s well being, and more.

See Doist job openings

Toggl

"We believe great people will make awesome stuff anywhere. No need to move for your dream job. We hire globally. You work locally."

Toggl is one of the simplest time-tracking tools–so simple, you'll actually use it. As the name suggests, all you have to do is press the start button in the web app, desktop app, mobile app, or Chrome extension to start tracking your time. Toggl also might have the best home page video ever.

Media relations manager for Toggl, Dunja Lazic, shared with us a few interesting things about working at the fully remote company. The team spans 9 timezones and 5 continents, but was founded in Estonia, "a rather small European country with big ambitions." Team members meet at retreats in places like a castle near Edinburgh and Recco, a small village on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Toggl encourages employees to travel, set their own goals, and take charge of their own work. You can learn more about Toggl's company values here.

See Toggl job openings

Toptal

"No offices, no useless meetings, no mandatory hours. You’re recognized for what you do, not your time in a chair."

If you're looking to hire a talented freelancer, check out Toptal, an exclusive network of freelance software developers and designers. Toptal matches your talent requirements with freelancers in their network, and then you work with them first on a risk-free trial basis. The company accepts only 3% or fewer of freelance applicants.

And Toptal is also hiring for employees to join their completely distributed team. Employees are currently working from the US, Russia, Bulgaria, Spain, Argentina, Thailand, and several other countries across the globe.

Currently there are several tech positions open at Toptal and dozens of openings for the rest of the business. If you don't see a position on Toptal's career page that's a match for you, you're encouraged to contact them anyway.

See Toptal job openings

YNAB (YouNeedABudget)

"Proximity doesn’t influence productivity so we all work remotely."

YNAB, which stands for You Need A Budget, is a popular budgeting app available for the web, iPhone, and Android. YNAB helps users create and stick to a realistic budget through a unique method of categorizing spending. It connects directly to bank accounts and your budget syncs across your devices.

Currently, the YNAB team of 40+ employees lives all over the world (71% of continents have a YNAB employee, in fact). Generous perks include a minimum paid vacation day requirement of 25 days, annual meetups, 100% medical insurance coverage, bonuses based on profitability, and retirement contributions of 3%–even if employees don't invest in the 401(k) themselves.

See YNAB job openings

Zapier

"We're a 100% distributed team living and working all over the world to help you automate the most tedious parts of your day to day job."

Last but not least, there's Zapier, an automation tool that connects your favorite web apps, such as Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and over 750 more. With Zapier-powered app integrations, you can move info between your apps automatically so you can focus on your best work. (By the way, Zapier rhymes with happier.)

The Zapier team of (currently) 80 people are spread across 13 countries. Zapier CEO and co-founder Wade Foster explains why the company chose to be completely distributed, without any headquarters:

It's a better way to work. It allows us to hire smart people no matter where in the world, and it gives those people hours back in their day to spend with friends and family. We save money on office space and all the hassles that comes with that. A lot of people are more productive in remote setting, though it does require some more discipline too.

Zapier employees keep connected on a daily basis with Slack for group chat, Google Docs and Hackpad for documentation, Trello for project management, Zoom for video conferencing, and an internal blog for team updates (what we use in place of team emails).

Job benefits include flexible work hours, unlimited vacation days, 4% company retirement match, profit sharing, generous health coverage, and 2-3 fully-paid retreats. (Most recently, the team got together in Boerne, TX. Wade says, however, that the most interesting retreat so far was to Timber Moose Lodge in Herber City, UT–the largest private log cabin in the US, "eccentric, maze-like, and amazing.")

See Zapier job openings

We reply to every applicant, even if it doesn't seem like a good fit.

Bonus: Other Remote Companies That Are Hiring

The companies above are completely virtual teams–no headquarters or any official physical presence. But many other companies do have offices while still embracing the remote work lifestyle.

Basecamp, for example, consists of about 50 employees across 32 cities around the world. They're the team behind the popular collaboration and project management tool. Around 14 members choose to work out of the company's Chicago headquarters; everyone, however, is free to work wherever they want. Basecamp CEO and founder Jason Fried and partner David Heinemeier Hansson, in fact, wrote a book about remote work, called Remote: Office Not Required. Basecamp job openings, when available, are posted to We Work Remotely—a great site to watch when looking for a remote position. See current Basecamp job openings.

Harvest is an intuitive, simple time tracking app that also lets you create invoices and keep track of expenses. Headquartered in New York City, the 50+ person Harvest team is distributed across the globe. See Harvest open positions.

Trello similarly also gives employees the option to work at their office in New York City or anywhere they want. "We’ll set you up wherever you are so long as you’ve got a quiet place to work, a good Internet connection, and we can legally pay you where you live." See current Trello job openings.

The Wirecutter and The Sweethome staff perform months of research and testing on products to help users quickly decide what to buy. They have a New York office where gadgets and gear are sent–and often tested or photographed–but no one on the team works there 9-5 and employees are free to work from anywhere. Here are the apps the team uses for remote work and the company's jobs page.

There are too many other companies to mention here that support remote work (which is a good thing!). For further help finding a company that will let you work from home or anywhere else, see:

This list of over 200 startups that hire remotely via Remotive.io
A list of over 50 large companies that allow more than half of employees to telecommute from Working Mother. (Select the telecommuting filter to find those companies.)
25+ resources for finding a remote job, such as telecommuting-focused job boards, from Hubstaff.

Know of any 100% remote companies? Share them with us in the comments.

Infographic vector designed by Freepik

The Ultimate Guide to G Suite: A New Free eBook From Zapier

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Wed, 17 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

Choosing a new to-do list app, form builder, presentation tool, or most other software isn't that big of a deal. After all, if it doesn't seem to work that well for this project, you could always try something different next time.

Your email and office suite, though, are a far more consequential choice. Odds are, you'll pick an email service for your company's domain and stick with it for years—even decades—to come. You'd better get it right the first time.

We've got the book to help. Google's G Suite is one of the best email and office suites you could use for your team, with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google's other popular apps customized for your business. And in Zapier's newest book, The Ultimate Guide to G Suite, we'll teach you how to set it up and get the most out of it.

Get the Free eBook!

In just 55 minutes—yup, we timed it—you can learn everything you need to set up a brand new G Suite account for your team with your company's domain name. Then, we'll show you how to customize Gmail and other G Suite apps with your branding, and give you hints on how to share calendars, contacts, document templates, email signatures, and more with your team—with workarounds for advanced features Google might not have included. It's everything you need to set up a modern productivity suite for your team.

Here's what you'll find inside:

How to Add G Suite to Your Domain

G Suite, formerly known as Google Apps, started out as just a version of Gmail for your own domain, but it quickly grew into an app with over a dozen tools. Today, it's not only one of the best ways to manage your company's email. it also includes tools for many of the other things your team needs to do.

We'll first take a quick look at what G Suite offers and how it compares to its competitors. Then, we'll dive right into setting up your own G Suite account. With just your company's domain and perhaps a half hour to spare, you'll have Gmail and more ready for your team to use.

If you've never set up a G Suite account, this is where to start.

→ Read Chapter 1: An Intro to G Suite

→ Read Chapter 2: Set Up Your G Suite Team Account

How to Customize G Suite for Your Team

Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and more are great on their own. They're even great for teamwork right out of the box. But they can be so much better for your team if you take a bit more time to customize them with your company's branding and share your most important stuff.

Chapters 3 and 4 will be helpful for new G Suite accounts as well as those with years of work behind them already. You'll learn how to import and export your G Suite data to make sure all of your most important data is secure. Then, you'll find out how to share everything in G Suite—team files, company-wide calendars, and customized email signatures for the whole team.

→ Read Chapter 3: Import Your Team's Data Into G Suite

→ Read Chapter 4: Add Company Email Signatures, Document Templates, Event Calendars, and More to G Suite

How to Keep Your Team Productive in G Suite

You're just about ready to start getting work done in your new, customized G Suite account. But before everyone starts overloading your team accounts with new files and emails, take a few minutes to learn how to keep everything organized.

Google Sites can help. The free website builder built into G Suite is a great place to build an intranet for your team where you can share company info and make sure everyone's on the same page. Then, before you click through a half-dozen folders looking for the right file, learn how to use Google's own search tools to dig into your data and quickly find the right thing every time.

→ Read Chapter 5: Build a Team Intranet in Google Sites

→ Read Chapter 6: Find Files, Emails, Contact Info, and More in G Suite

→ Read Chapter 7: Learn More with G Suite Resources

G Suite isn't that complicated. It's just Gmail and Google Docs, grown up and ready for work. With just a few tweaks and customizations, however, you can make it the perfect place for your team to work together.

Whether you're starting a new G Suite account for your company or want to get more out of the G Suite account you've used for years, this is the book for you. Download a copy, set aside an hour to work through it, and you'll gain that time back and more with the new tips and tricks you'll learn about your Google apps.

Learn More from Zapier's Other Books

Don't stop there. Zapier has free eBooks that can help take your business to the next level, whether you're running an online store or working in any other business. Here are some great ones to start with:

Want to build get more out of your new G Suite account? The Ultimate Guide to Google Sheets gives you a crash course into getting the most out of Google's spreadsheet and forms apps.
Starting a new online business? The Ultimate Guide to eCommerce Software includes the tips and tools you need to start your own store and accept payments online.
Need help taking care of your new customers? The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support teaches you how to handle the most difficult customer situations and gives you the apps to make customer support a bit easier.
Trying to spread the word about your products? The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Apps details the best practices for sending out email newsletters and drip messages and helps you find the best format for your emails.

And on the Zapier Blog you'll find new articles each week about the best apps, productivity tips, workflows, and more. It's your daily inspiration to get more done.

Scrivener vs Ulysses: The Best App for Longform Writing

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Mon, 15 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

You don't really need a new app to write. You could write a book in your email drafts, Notepad, your phone's notes app, or even in SMS messages if you're desperate. All you need is a blank space to type your thoughts.

What would be nice, though, is a tool that makes editing your text, organizing your thoughts, and formatting your final copy into a publishable eBook or print document. Perhaps something that'd help break a chapter into smaller pieces, let you find every mention of a character in seconds, or hide distractions and force you to write.

Microsoft Word is great for formatting your resume and shorter essays, as is Google Docs for writing within a team. Plain-text apps like iA Writer and Byword keep things focused on just your text. Adobe InDesign is state-of-the-art for turning text into beautiful print books and one-pagers.

For everything else—books, longform documents, blog posts, theses—there are two other great apps: Ulysses and Scrivener. Here's how Ulysses and Scrivener compare.

Ulysses vs. Scrivener:

A Brief Intro to Ulysses and Scrivener
Research and Outline
Writing
Organizing Documents
Publishing
Which Should You Use?

Scrivener, This is Ulysses. Ulysses, Scrivener.

Scrivener looks like a traditional word processor with a document organizer

This is Scrivener. It's somewhat similar to Word at first glance, with a formatting toolbar where you can choose your font, format your text, and tweak other settings.

The sidebar makes the difference—that's where you organize your document with Draft and Research groups. Here you can: Add extra folders and documents to your draft to organize your project into books, chapters, and even individual paragraphs. Split a long document or combine sections in a new folder. Keep your notes, outline, and broader ideas in the research folder, with a card view to preview each while you're writing. And when you're done, export it all for print or into a PDF, rich text Word document, Final Draft screenplay, ePub or MOBI eBook, or an HTML webpage.

Scrivener costs $45 on macOS, $40 on Windows, and $19.99 on iOS.

Ulysses looks a bit more like a modern email or notes apps with 3 columns and a sparse toolbar

And this is Ulysses. It looks a bit simpler, perhaps like a notes app with 2 smaller left columns and a larger writing column. It accommodates Markdown formatting—so instead of tapping a button to bold text, you'll add two asterisks like **this** to bold it. Or, you could just press CMD + B like normal; Ulysses does its best to hide Markdown formatting and make it easy to use.

In addition to the main document view, you can add and view notes and references in a different sidebar or just add each note to its own document, expand it later with your final copy, and then merge individual documents into one larger file. And you can export your finished work for print or in PDF, Word document, ePub, or HTML formats—or can publish directly to WordPress and Medium blogs.

Ulysses costs $44.99 on macOS and $24.99 on iOS—and it doesn't run on Windows.

Both apps let you save notes, organize documents, write, and export your finished work—at a similar price. So what makes them different beyond their user interface?

Research and Outlining in Scrivener and Ulysses

Scrivener makes it easy to see all of your notes at a glance

You have to start somewhere, and Scrivener hopes you'll start out with research. Each writing project includes a Research folder where you can add text notes or import full web pages and files from your computer for future reference.

Each document and note includes a title, the core text section, along with slightly hidden description and notes fields. Tap the i button to preview the description in a sidebar—a great place to list that document's main points and sketch out what it'll cover.

With your Research notes or your Draft documents, you can view the full documents with the default writing view. Or you can use the Corkboard view to preview just the title and description or the Outline view to see all your document metadata—perfect for organizing your document notes.

Ulysses lets you add notes, attachments, and goals to your document's sidebar

Ulysses is a bit more focused on your documents themselves. There's always the core writing pane visible. So, instead of adding notes separately, you could add your write your ideas in new documents and just manage them in a separate folder from your actual draft documents.

Or, you could add notes to your documents via Ulysses' slightly hidden right sidebar. Tap the paperclip icon in the toolbar to open that sidebar, where you can drag in files for reference and add notes panes with the details you need for each document. Those notes will only be visible if you open the sidebar, as a great way to add reference to your documents that guide your writing.

That means it might make sense to plan out your full writing project first, making new documents for every section. Then, when you're ready to write, open the notes pane in each document, and paste in your quotes and references there.

Writing in Scrivener and Ulysses

Scrivener's Compose mode hides distractions while showing the writing details you need

Now it's time to turn those notes into copy—something both Scrivener and Ulysses are great at. In Scrivener, just select the document you want to write in and start writing. To help you stay focused, tap the Compose icon to go full-screen. That can hide everything, with a black background and a paper-like space to write—or it can show your notes and more in floating panes.

You can use rich text or Markdown to format your document—though rich text is the default. If you write in Markdown, just make sure to MultiMarkdown export options in Scrivener's Compile screen.

You'll find a wide number of Scrivener templates online—as well as a handful you can choose from when making a new Scrivener project. These will include text formatting, page layouts, and folder structures that will help you make a document in that style—perhaps to write a college essay, screenplay, or book draft in a format that looks correct from the start.

Ulysses gives you a number of ways to focus on writing as well. You can hide the left sidebars by swiping to the left with your trackpad—or press CMD + 3 to hide them all at once. The toolbar will hide automatically as you're writing. Use the macOS full-screen button (the green one in your top toolbar) to hide everything else—or open the sidebar and drag out your attachments and notes into floating panes for reference while writing.

For even more focus, the Typewriter Mode options in the View menu can highlight your current line, sentence, or paragraph, and keep your typing centered on the screen like a typewriter (Scrivener includes that latter feature, too).

Since Ulysses uses Markdown formatting, there are no options to format your text style and colors in the main app. Instead, you'll set a typeface for all your documents in Ulysses' settings. You can also choose a theme (or download a new one) to style your text in any colors you want—since it's just plain text, none of that will be included in your final document. You'll use export themes, instead, for that (more on that later).

Both Scrivener and Ulysses help you focus on your writing. Their main difference is in how your format your text. Scrivener's best if you prefer using rich text formatting; Ulysses' is better if you want plain-text with Markdown formatting without a toolbar of options.

Organizing Documents in Scrivener and Ulysses

Organize your Scrivener documents in folders, add labels and status to track them, and form ad hoc collections

Scrivener's reference folder and multiple view options make it great to visualize your entire work at once. You can zoom out and view everything on a virtual corkboard, where you can drag-and-drop notes, webpages, images, and more into the order you want. Then select anything to dive in and write in full-screen. It's your real content in a mindmap, just like Sherlock would do on his living room wall.

You can also group documents more logically into folders, or add labels, status indicators, and colors to keep as much data in each document as you want. View it all together in the spreadsheet-like Outline view, or use smart Collections to group documents in any way you want.

Use folders to organize Ulysses documents—or just glue related documents

Where Scrivener lets you arrange your documents in free-form boards, Ulysses keeps things a bit more orderly with your documents in lists. It includes default folders and document lists, which you can drag-and-drop into the order and hierarchy you want. To move notes between documents, you'd need to copy/paste. There are tags—called keywords in Ulysses, hidden in the right sidebar—which you can uncover via search or from the small keyword icon in the center document pane. And there are smart folders that can group documents by keyword, text, the date they were updated, and more.

Where Ulysses shines is in splitting and merging your documents. Decide a chapter's running a bit too long? Press CMD + Shift + B to split everything below your cursor into a new document. Want two documents together? Drag them together in the document list, select them both, right-click, and select Glue Sheets to link them together or Merge Sheets to turn them into one single document. It's a great way to reorganize your text.

Publishing in Scrivener and Ulysses

Scrivener includes detailed publishing tools

Scrivener's Compile screen is Scrivener at its most powerful. There are dozens of options to export your finished work however you want. You can select the documents and folders from a project to be exported, choose which have a page break and which are treated as a single document, and filter out documents with specific keywords if you want. It can format out your smart quotes, remove comments (something else Scrivener's document editor offers) and other formatting, and add the precise print layout you want. Then it can export your work in 17 formats.

It's complicated but powerful.

Ulysses previews your document while exporting it

Ulysses makes things quicker—literally, its main export tool is called Quick Export. Select the documents or folders you want to publish, tap the iOS-style Share button in the toolbar, then choose the format you want to export and select Preview.

There, you can choose a theme for your published document—something else you can download from Ulysses. See how everything looks, then save the document in the format you want. There are few options other than a setting to include a cover and title with ePub exports. Or, if you want to publish online, you can add your Medium or WordPress account and publish your selected documents in a click.

Should You Use Scrivener or Ulysses?

Scrivener's the big brother. It's been around since 2007 and has helped an incredible number of authors write their books. It's powerful, with more features than you'll likely ever use. It's flexible enough to work with rich text or Markdown, with tools to arrange documents in a free-form corkboard or a detailed list and enough export options to get your book looking just like you want.

Ulysses is a bit newer to town. While its older versions date back over 14 years, the current version is a redesigned tool first launched in 2013—and so it feels a lot newer. It's simple, easy to use, with few features to tempt you to tweak. As such, it's a bit less flexible, a bit more reliant on you following its writing style—and quite a bit easier to quickly write and export your work.

Still can't decide? Check our detailed guides to both Scrivener and Ulysses—and try each app's trials. Truth be told, you can't go wrong with either one.

Do you use Scrivener, Ulysses, or another app to manage your longform writing? We'd love to hear what makes your favorite writing app the best for you.

How to Use HubSpot CRM and Zapier to Close More Deals

ashley.hockney@zapier.com (Ashley Hockney) — Thu, 11 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

There was a time working in a small but quickly growing company where I realized we had a data and processes problem. At the time, I was using a different system for email list management than I was for tracking important deals. Conversion rates were buried in a lead gen tool. It worked, but not well. Whenever I sat down to judge the effectiveness of a campaign or to segment my lists, I hit a roadblock. That's when we turned to HubSpot CRM.

HubSpot CRM became for us what it is for many others, an all-in-one solution for closing more leads. The customer relationship management (CRM) tool automatically logs emails with your contacts. It helps your sales team navigate and chart opportunities by tracking email conversations, contacts, companies, and deals and tasks—in one seamless package. Your data is consistent across all marketing properties and in one place so you can get a quick skim of what's going on in your business.

Close More Deals with HubSpot CRM

Pair HubSpot CRM with Zapier, and you can stretch the abilities of your all-in-one solution. Zapier is a workflow automation tool that enables HubSpot CRM users to send data seamlessly between the sales tool and over 750 other applications. If you're generating contacts in another app, automatically send them to HubSpot so your email list is updated, pristine, and accurate in real time. Conversely, you can kick off workflows in your other tools when contacts, deals, or companies are updated in HubSpot CRM.

The two tools together give you the power and consistency of a trusted CRM solution with the agility to update, experiment, and play with your existing marketing stack. Here's how the best and brightest are using HubSpot CRM and Zapier to close more deals with less work.

Set Up the Integration with HubSpot CRM & Zapier
Create & Update Your Contacts Automatically
Manage New Deals & Companies

Set Up the Integration Between HubSpot CRM & Zapier

With a Zapier integration, you can connect your HubSpot data to all the other tools your team uses, such as Facebook Lead Ads, Google Sheets, Gravity Forms, Wufoo, and Slack—all without writing a single line of code.

"Zaps" (our name for app workflows) can be created in minutes. Use them to automatically add contacts to Hubspot from new form submissions, send new contacts to mailing lists, and more.

Let's say you're using Google Contacts to manage new leads that you meet. Rather than manually import new contact information on a repeating basis, you can set up a Zap that creates a contact in HubSpot from every new contact in Google Contacts. All of your data is updated in HubSpot from new Google Contacts automatically. You'll save time and never have to worry about human error—something that naturally happens in repetitive work like this.

Click on the button above to create this Zap, or explore the HubSpot CRM Zapbook Page which details the integration and suggests recommended Zaps:

HubSpot CRM Zapbook Page

You can also create custom Zaps that fit your specific needs. To set up a Zap like this on your own, log in to your Zapier account and click "Make a Zap." Start out by connecting your contacts app to Zapier:

Choose Your Trigger App

In the second step, connect your HubSpot CRM account to Zapier and customize your Zap. Notice how you can map very specific information from your first app into detailed fields about your contacts in HubSpot.

Add Contact to HubSpot CRM

From this moment on, whenever a new contact is created in your first app, Zapier will create or update a contact in HubSpot CRM.

This is just one example, and in the world of sales, leads come in from multiple different funnels. Keep them all in one place and get a holistic, accurate, and powerful view of your pipeline using the HubSpot CRM-Zapier integration. You can explore all of the possibilities between the two tools on the HubSpot CRM-Zapier Zapbook Page.

While it’s easy to think of this integration as simple—and it is—it’s also extremely powerful. When using the New Contact Trigger, you’re able to send much more than just first name, last name, and email to your other apps. No friend, this is just the beginning.

Depending on what you ask for when you collect a contact in HubSpot CRM, the New Contact Trigger has the potential to pass a whole bunch of information to your other apps, such as:

Company Name: Send this information to a database and check for companies you’d like to partner with
Job Title: Pass this information to a spreadsheet, sort by title and discover what the most common career is for your user to tailor your marketing efforts
City: Expose what city your contacts are from and decide where you should host your next meetup.
Create Date: Expose contacts who have worked with you for over a year
Twitter Username & Follower Count, LinkedIn Bio & Number of Connections: Send this information to a database and pinpoint influencers using your tool

These are just a few fields, but the HubSpot CRM-Zapier integration has dozens of options like this so you can automatically send immense amounts of detailed data to and from your apps. It puts bespoke automation at your fingertips.

Create & Update Your Contacts Automatically

Contacts, or your leads and customers, are the lifeblood of your business. You likely have new customers coming in from multiple sources—your blog, a recent promotion, organic signups, webinars, and more. However, all the work you put into generating leads is moot if you don't get their information into your system and begin a nurturing process.

View Contact Details Within HubSpot CRM

Import New Contacts From Lead Gen Tools

As marketing- and sales-minded professionals, we often use multiple tools to generate new leads—often experimenting with the latest cutting edge apps and replacing those that have come and gone. Using Zapier, you can quickly add a new lead gen tool to your stack and import contacts automatically.

For example, Marcos Pelaez, a marketer at SemcoCAD uses the HubSpot CRM-Zapier integration to automatically create HubSpot contacts from new leads in Facebook Lead Ads, the lead-generation tool Facebook recently rolled out.

"Our website is one of the main sources of training in CAD courses in engineering and architecture. We collect more than 50 leads daily from Facebook and Formularuis and chat. The most important thing for us is to deliver these leads to our telemarketers to serve our customers as soon as possible," Pelaez told us.

"Before Zapier, we took a long time downloading and registering one by one the lead in HubSpot. Now everything is automated. Thanks to that, our response time in Facebook Messenger and Chat-Web decreased."

The same process can be applied to other new lead gen tools like LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms, SumoMe, or LeadPages.

Natalia Bandach, Product Marketing Specialist at Kantox, was one of the first people to use the Zapier-LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms integration just a few days after the new LinkedIn solution was launched. To her, it was only natural that she look for a way to integrate lead data with the existing CRM and content management software. Why manually import data when you don't have to?

"We use the integration to keep all our lead data in one place. We use HubSpot and Salesforce on daily basis, and the integration helps us to set alerts and workflows based on the new leads coming from LinkedIn," Kantox told us. "It reduces time and manual workload. Instead of downloading a CSV sheet and then uploading it on a daily basis to Hubspot, we just integrated Hubspot with Linkedin and now the flow is automatic."

With new lead gen tools and new experiments, it's essential that today's sales and marketing team have a quick process to rope in leads from one tool into their standard CRM Solution.

I would recommend any integration that reduces manual work, so that the team can focus on more value adding tasks."-Natalia Bandach, Product Marketing Specialist at Kantox

Easily Create Contacts from Business Cards

While in-person meetings and events can help create personal connections with your partners, it can be cumbersome to add these contacts to your online databases. Of course, there's an app for that.

Will Curran is the founder of Endless Events. Both in his role and his company, he's the kind of guy who receives a lot of business cards. Doing his due diligence, he manages the process of passing off new contact information to his sales teams by scanning information from business cards using Full Contact. He then uses Zapier to send that information to his sales team via HubSpot CRM. His workflow also includes notifying his team in Slack when information in HubSpot CRM changes.

"I've been using Zapier for a long time now and when I became a HubSpot customer three years ago it was natural to start using [the Hubspot-Zapier integration],"" Curran told us. "It notifies my team in Slack channel of new leads and notifies multiple people quickly. Also saved me time on having to manually enter business cards into the CRM."

Automatically Add Eventbrite Contacts to HubSpot CRM

Today's best marketers aren't just working online, they're networking and attending and organizing events. Often times, this is done through Eventbrite. While Eventbrite makes it easy to quickly create a large list of attendees, Zapier makes it easy to add these contacts to HubSpot.

Drew Beechler, Marketing Analyst at High Alpha does just this.

"We use Zapier to connect Eventbrite registrations to HubSpot. We regularly host events and have attendees register via Eventbrite. We use Zapier to feed Eventbrite registrations into HubSpot and update fields in HubSpot based on what events people are registering for," Beechler said.

Without this integration, employee time would be spent exporting a CSV, formatting the data, and uploading into HubSpot to keep all of the information at your fingertips.

"[The integration] is an incredible value and time saver. I used to do this all manually and kept track via Excel, which was a major pain," Beecher said.

Add Contacts from Intercom to HubSpot CRM

As your team’s marketing practices evolve, it’s possible that you’re using Intercom and HubSpot CRM. Luckily, it’s as simple as setting up a quick two-step Zap to create new and robust contacts in HubSpot from your live chat, in-app messaging, or customer support initiatives in Intercom.

Zack Katz, Product Lead at GravityView, uses this integration to add contacts to HubSpot from his Intercom interfaces on his website.

“I wanted to have a way to easily keep track of customer details in a place that was not my website. I wanted to add notes about a customer, including their workplace, family, etc. so that I could better interact with them. Adding to HubSpot was important for that,” Katz told us.

Send Zendesk Tickets to HubSpot Contacts

Some customers need hand holding, and for that you’ve got customer support software. Make sure you track new customers that first reach out to your support team by adding them to HubSpot CRM.

"[We use the integration] to link our CRM with our helpdesk to enable monitoring," said Carole Mcnally of Biomni. "It enables us to view updates to tickets while linked to customers. [It's] very useful for monitoring any issues customers have."

Not only can you create or update contact information, but you can add contacts to a list based off of information from Zendesk. You can also append information coming in from Zendesk as a note about your contacts. This integration is powerful in what it allows you to automatically send from one tool to another.

Add HubSpot New Contacts to Google Sheets

While there are a plethora of new apps and tools being released each day, sometimes a good old spreadsheet is exactly what you need.

Create one that’s always up-to-date and free of human error without any additional effort by sending information about new contacts added in HubSpot CRM to a Google Sheet.

This works well if you’re trying to share a quick list of specific contacts, create a backup of your email list, or set up advanced workflows.

Vishal Sunak of LinkSquares uses the integration for tracking sales metrics like calls, demos, trials, deals.

"[The integration] enables me to automated the tracking of all our sales funnel metrics… number of calls, number of demos, number of free trials, number of closed deals."

Using Companies & Deals Within HubSpot CRM

HubSpot companies and deals are a lesser-known, yet powerful feature—as are the automations you can set up with them.

Here are a few ideas for using this aspect of the integration to save time and convert leads faster. We created templates below to help you do it. Just click on the template that suits your need, and we’ll walk you through setting up the Zap.

View Companies Within HubSpot CRM

Take Action When New Deals Are Created

When your team is in the loop about new deals, they can close them quicker. Create Zaps that send notifications, create team tasks, or kick off a workflow from new deals in HubSpot CRM.

Create Deals From Your Other Databases

Set up Zaps that automatically create deals in HubSpot CRM, so your sales team can get to work immediately when new info comes in from your other apps.

Take Action When Deals Enter a Stage

Trigger a workflow when a new deal enters a stage and then nurture leads with email sequences, alert your team, create tasks, and more. You can also now associate multiple contacts with a deal and link deals to a company, giving you a better perspective of what’s going on within HubSpot CRM.

Keep Track of Companies Using Your Software

Partnerships with other companies can be powerful, but you won’t know what companies are using your product unless you have a way to quickly scan for them. Use this integration’s New Company Trigger and send information about a new company to other databases.

Create deals within HubSpot itself or send information to a document in Google Sheet or Excel. You can also ping your team in Slack so your whole team is aware of new companies interested in your business.

Create Companies Automatically

Automatically create companies within HubSpot CRM from information in your other apps using a new Create Company Action. For example, if you’re collecting and surveying leads in other tools, pass information about where they work to HubSpot where it’s easily searchable, shared, and accessible by all team members.

You can even create a Zap that combines multiple apps and steps. For example, when you get an email and label it as “Deal,” the Zap can automatically create a company in HubSpot and then trigger a notification in your team Slack channel.

Find and Update Companies and Deals Automatically

Data and information are constantly evolving. With the HubSpot CRM-Zapier integration, you can make sure these changes are automatically reflected in your CRM.

Use the Find Deal or Find Company Searches to pinpoint specific companies and deals that already exist in HubSpot CRM. Then use the Update Company or Update Deal Action to automatically update information.

For example, whenever a new attendee registers in Eventbrite, you can search HubSpot CRM for their company and update information about it, like mentioning they registered for this event.

HubSpot CRM + Zapier, Better Together

Turbo charge, stretch, and organize your CRM by pairing HubSpot CRM with Zapier and your favorite apps. Whether you’re testing out new lead gen tools, notifying your team, or kicking off nurturing flows, this integration will help you seamlessly send data to and from HubSpot. Zapier integrates with 750+ apps, many of which didn't make it into this post but that you can still integrate with HubSpot CRM to close more deals, faster.

Do you use HubSpot CRM and Zapier in a unique way that we didn't cover here? Share your ideas in the comments below!

How to Work at a Coffee Shop Like a Pro

emily.irish@zapier.com (Emily Irish) — Wed, 10 May 2017 07:39:20 -0000

One of the best parts of remote work is the freedom to work from anywhere. For most of us, "anywhere" includes a lot of time spent at the local coffee shop.

If you love working in a cozy cafe with a fresh cup of delicious caffeine in your hands, you’re not alone. But if you’re ready to step up your remote-work game, here are six tips for working in a coffee shop that’ll put you with the pros.

#1 - Know Your Cafe

Not all cafes are created equally when it comes to remote work. Many cafes are focused on creating local community, and aren't well-suited to those who want to work.

"Do your research when checking out a new place to make sure the cafe is work-friendly," suggests Juan Vazquez, a Customer Champion at Zapier. He uses the iOS app Work Hard Anywhere to find cafes that are work-friendly anywhere in the world.

Christina Buiza, another one of our awesome Customer Champions, agrees. "Do your research ahead of time by visiting sites such as workfrom.co to see if the coffee shop is remote-friendly," she says.

If none of these sources have the information you’re looking for, try sleuthing through Yelp photos—are others using their laptops? Do you see outlets?

Can’t find the information you need online? Do things the old fashioned way: Call ahead and ask if they have free Wi-Fi. If they say no, it's most likely not a great place to work, and you’ll be saved the hassle of finding out the hard way.

#2 - Befriend Your Baristas

One of the best ways you can support your favorite cafe is by treating their baristas well. Food service is never an easy job, and if a barista feels underpaid or mistreated, they can find another place to work, leaving your favorite cafe in a lurch.

Tip your baristas well, especially if you’re going to be taking up space in their shop for several hours. An extra buck or two won’t hurt you, but it will mean a lot to your barista. They’ll remember you—if you tipped, how much, and whether you treated them with respect.

When you order, offer your barista a smile and ask about their day. If you’re a regular, don’t be afraid to greet your barista by name. A little kindness will go a long way, and again—it’s a small effort that could make someone’s day.

This kindness is not without its benefits for you—remembering your favorite drink, for example, or putting a little extra care when making your order. Asad Zulfahri, world traveler and Zapier’s SEO & Growth Manager, discovered an extra benefit for remote workers. "Make sure the barista knows you so they’ll give you free internet," he says. "Some places offer free internet for only 2 hours, so I make an effort to get to know all the staff so when I walk in, they’ll just give me free wifi codes for the entire day!"

#3 - Buy Something Every Few Hours

We remote workers love our caffeine, and let’s be honest—it’s nice to have a reason to put your pants on and go outside for an afternoon. Show your appreciation by supporting your local cafe.

"You've got less freedom in a coffee shop than a coworking spot," says Matt Guay, senior editor & writer at Zapier. "Don't hog too much space, do buy more stuff if you stay longer."

Jordan Sherer, Zapier’s Product Engineering Lead, has gotten this down to a science. His recommendation? "Talk with the barista and order a couple of drinks ahead of time that way there's no waiting in line to refresh your caffeine levels."

Interesting to note that Starbucks offers an extra carrot to encourage their patrons to stay longer. Starbucks offers free refills to Starbucks Rewards patrons. Regardless of your initial drink, you can get a hot or iced brewed coffee or tea for free as your refill (during the same store visit).

Take advantage of this offer by all means, but be sure you pay it forward to your baristas by leaving them a nice tip for your free drink.

#4 - Be a Hero: Don’t Hog the Outlets

Outlet space is at a premium in most coffee shops. Most of us would rather work plugged-in and save our battery power "just in case"—but there are rarely enough outlets for everyone, and power adapters (especially for Macs) can get bulky.

Melanie Pinola, our Editorial Manager here at Zapier, advises you change the outlet game by bringing your own surge protector, like this one from Belkin. It’s travel-sized, and will not only provide your laptop with protection, but gives you a chance to be the hero of the hour by providing more outlet space.

#5 - Use the Community Table

A lot of coffee shops provide a long table with good outlet access. This table is intended to accommodate several individual workers. I know it can be difficult for the more introverted remote workers (myself included), but there are a lot of good reasons for you to sit at this "community table."

It frees up tables for patrons who are there to meet a friend or colleague. You only need one chair, after all.
People are there to work. In this space, you’re less likely to be interrupted by someone having a conversation or talking on the phone.
It’s a great place for serendipitous networking to happen, especially if you’re a regular.

Just remember—these long tables are always intended for multiple people, so keep your backpack on the floor to leave room for others.

#6 - Be Aware of Others

The golden rule of working at a coffee shop: Don’t Be "That Guy." We all know who that is: the person who leaves their trash all over the table, takes up enough space for two people with their belongings, all while talking loudly on the phone about personal matters…

Don’t be that guy. Respect the cafe and its patrons by keeping noise to a minimum, cleaning up after yourself, and not hogging extra space. If you have to take a call (video or voice) while working at a coffee shop, try to keep your voice low.

Also remember that you’re not at a library, and in fact many people go to coffee shops to hang out with their friends. A good pair of noise-cancelling headphones is a remote worker’s best friend.

Our Favorite Coffee Shops

At Zapier, we live and work all over the world. Need a coffee shop recommendation? Try one of our favorites!

Cup A Joe, Raleigh, NC

"It’s the size of three coffee shops, while still managing to feel cozy. Plenty of tables, chairs, outlets, and natural light. The bright, quirky decor really excites my creativity. It’s also close to a couple colleges, so it’s very quiet with a work/study vibe."- Emily Irish, Content Marketer.

Dunn Bros. Freight House, Minneapolis, MN

"I can walk to this shop, and it has an awesome upstairs workspace." - Joe Stych, Product Marketer.

Red Dot Coffee Company, Northville, MI

"It’s an old house that they turned into a coffee shop so it’s really cozy. They also have the world’s best cappucino." - Meghan Gezo, People Ops Specialist.

Blue State Coffee, New Haven, CT

"Lots of plugs and space." - Thomas Hils, Support Training Lead.

Quack’s Bakery, Austin, TX

"Plenty of outdoor seating, restaurants and snacks immediately next door, great coffee and friendly servers that make it feel like a little neighborhood. Consistent wifi and usually there’s seating." - Zen Ren, Customer Champion.

Paradocs Coffee & Tea, Los Angeles, CA

"It’s very tiny and hard to find! But more importantly, they have a huge selection of loose leaf tea, nice soothing music, and power strips everywhere. They also have very strong wifi. The owner is very friendly and most people who go there are regulars, so it has a lovely neighborly feel." - Katie Redderson-Lear, Customer Champion.

Just Bob, Portland, OR

"It’s walkable from my house. And they let me pay my tab at the end. And they have an order called "The Adam" for my regular order." - Adam Duvander, Developer Marketing.

Letstat’s, San Diego, CA

"Plenty of seats and outlets. Most other folks are also there to get work done. It is open 24/7." - Juan Vazquez, Customer Champion.

Octane Coffee, Atlanta, GA

"Great coffee!!!!" - Jordan Sherer, Product Engineering Lead.

Aje Cafe, Chicago, IL

"At Aje Cafe, I love that it isn't a super popular spot. There are always plenty of tables to work at and armchairs, too." - Carlin Sack, Partner Marketing.

Waves Coffee House, Vancouver, BC

"Despite having an appreciation for more 'trendy' coffee shops, I've grown to love Waves Coffee for their reliability. They have fast, stable internet, lots of power outlets, large windows, comfortable seats, and delicious mochas." - Christina Buiza, Customer Champion.

Cup Phu Sino, Bangkok, Thailand

"Really great coffee in my neighborhood with local-sourced beans." - Matthew Guay, Senior Editor & Writer.

Collectivo, Wisconsin

"Plants everywhere. Almond croissants and excellent coffee. Smoothies for my son. Also they serve beer." - Vicky Cassidy, Platform Lead.

Wish you could work from your favorite coffee shop? Zapier is hiring! Come join our growing, fully-remote team.

Coffee house image by Jazmin Quaynor.

How to Get to Inbox Zero and Manage Your Email

melanie.pinola@zapier.com (Melanie Pinola) — Tue, 09 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

In Greek mythology, the Hydra is a serpent-like monster with nine snake heads. Cut off one of the Hydra's heads and two more grow back in its place. Trying to manage your email is like battling the Hydra: finish one email, and more will spring into your inbox in its stead.

Getting to and, more importantly, maintaining Inbox Zero—that utopian state of a totally empty inbox—can be a Herculean task. With some smart strategies and tools, though, you can defeat email overflow and finally make email more manageable. Here's how to succeed in your quest.

Know Your Goal: What is Inbox Zero?
How to Get to Inbox Zero
Maintain Inbox Zero with 8 Strategies
The Best Apps for Inbox Zero
Bonus: Automate Email Management with Zapier

Know Your Goal: What Is Inbox Zero?

To achieve success, you must first define success. So what is this mythical Inbox Zero, really? "Inbox Zero" is a term coined by productivity guru Merlin Mann on 43 Folders. Contrary to popular belief, Inbox Zero doesn't refer to the number of emails in your inbox at all times. It's about regaining control from the tyranny of email. As Mann explains:

It’s about how to reclaim your email, your attention, and your life. That "zero?" It’s not how many messages are in your inbox—it’s how much of your own brain is in that inbox. Especially when you don’t want it to be. That’s it.

Most of us spend way too much time on email—as much as 6.3 hours a day, according to one survey. Even though dealing with email is not our primary work, we prioritize it because each email that comes in begs for our attention and could be important. Fall behind on emails and let them pile up in our inbox? That just causes stress thanks to the Zeigarnik effect—all those unanswered, unread, and unprocessed emails constantly bugging our brains. If you find yourself writing "I'm sorry for the late reply" more often than you'd like to, a cluttered inbox could be the cause.

The cost, of course, is our productivity. Somewhere between fanatically checking our email every two minutes and letting email collect like dust in an abandoned attic, there's a solution: a system for working with the constant flow of email, so that Inbox Zero becomes a habit rather than an elusive goal. At its true core, Inbox Zero is about more efficiently dealing with our email so we can get out of the inbox and back to what matters most.

How to Get to Inbox Zero

First, we're going to clean out our inboxes so we can start with a blank slate. The easiest way to do this is to move all of the emails in your inbox into a "DMZ" (demilitarized zone) folder. Mann suggests:

Open your email program and create a new folder called "DMZ"

Go to your email inbox and Select All
You might alternatively choose all email older than n days

Drag those emails from your inbox into the DMZ folder

Go, and sin no more.

This might seem intimidating, but all of those emails will still be available. With a clean, empty inbox, you can now develop the habits you need to make managing new emails a breeze.

Maintain Inbox Zero with These 8 Strategies

Now that you've got a fresh start, you need a system to avoid falling back into the "too many emails" trap.

Schedule email opening

"Increasingly, it feels as though the only reprieve from the influx of e-mail, whether self-imposed or otherwise, is to get the hell out of your inbox.""- Silvia Killingsworth in The New Yorker

Don't spend all day checking your email or jump into your inbox every time you get an email notification (in fact, we think you should turn off desktop notifications for email). Instead, schedule a couple of regular times in your workday to check email and batch process them. For example, you might check and process email from 10-10:30, then 2-2:30, and perhaps at the end of your workday.

When you're on the go, Inbox by Gmail can come in handy. Its features let you tap to snooze emails until later and swipe to quickly delete or archive them. When you're waiting in line or have other downtime, you can use that opportunity to clean out your inbox.

Use the "touch it once" rule

Have you ever heard the recommendation to never touch a piece of paper more than once? The idea is that handling the same piece of paper more than once is a waste of time. As soon as you touch a piece of paper, decide what you're going to do with it.

The same principle should apply to each email. Once you open an email, make a decision about it, whether that's quickly replying to the email, archiving it, or deleting it. Do not—I repeat, do not—leave that email to go read the next one. That's like saving all of your voicemail messages only to listen to them again the next day and the next.

Zapier CEO Wade Foster uses this strategy to maintain his own inbox:

My trick is I only do about one real pass at email a day. I get what I get done and archive the rest.

Quick decision on if I care or not. So each email gets about 3 seconds to pull me in. Then it either goes to archive or gets a response.

Use the Yesterbox technique to stay on top of emails

CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, came up with this email management technique that helps him reduce the friction of deciding which emails to deal with and how to handle all of them. Called "Yesterbox," the technique simply requires you to process each email from yesterday and remove it from your inbox.

"When processing yesterday's inbox, you must process 10 of yesterday's emails before you're allowed to look at any emails that are coming in today," Hsieh advises. "After you've processed 10 (meaning removed them from yesterday's inbox either by replying, filing, deleting, or calendaring them…then your "reward" is that you get to read the new emails that have come in. (Generally, I've found that it takes me about 30 minutes to process 10 emails.)

Most emails can wait for a response within 24 hours, so Yesterbox should keep you on track when dealing with all those emails. Do this as a hard and fast rule, and you'll break yourself of your email procrastination habit.

Turn emails into to-dos

Often we leave emails in our inbox because we're waiting to do something about them or they require a more detailed response. But once left there, more emails come in, burying the important ones. Email makes a terrible to-do list.

Get those actionable emails out of your inbox and into a place better suited for tracking your tasks. SquareSpace CEO Anthony Casalena writes:

Every email in my inbox is an action item. If it’s not something I need to act upon, I will archive it. If it’s an event, I’ll schedule it on my calendar and get rid of the email. If it’s something that will take me a while to complete, I’ll move the action item to a separate long-term list.

This is the same workflow Asian Efficiency recommends:

Advanced email management workflow (via Asian Efficiency)

Instead of manually copying emails into other apps, use Zapier's automations to send the info out of your inbox and into your favorite tools. For example, you can star or label an email in Gmail or tag an email in Office 365 to turn that email directly into a to-do item in Asana, Trello, Basecamp, or whatever system you prefer.

"The Zap I'm using most often right now takes a starred email in Gmail and moves it into an Asana project called 'Email Tasks," says Rick Wilkes of consulting firm Thriving Now. "This puts it into both my Asana task list and inbox, where I can move it to another project. So easy!"

Strategic planning consultant Jonathan Deckert finds value in the same integration after exhausting himself with manual entry. "I used to star emails that required further action that I could not complete immediately. Then I would copy the subject line and paste it as an Asana task," Deckert says. "After doing this for awhile over multiple Gmail addresses and multiple Asana workspaces, I figured that there had to be a better way." There is and it's Zapier.

Never hassle with attachments again

"Anytime we need story ideas, we pop that folder open."

Like most news organization, In&Out Magazine in Anthem, Ariz., receives press releases daily. Instead of spending time filing interesting press releases for consideration later, In&Out publisher Nadine Shaalan simply adds a Gmail label and the attached press release is automatically saved elsewhere.

"When I [label] that email as something that's potentially good for editorial, Zapier will take the content of the email and move it into Google Docs into our 'Potential Stories' folder," she says. On top of that, another Zapier automation sends the attachment to Google Drive, as well.

"Anytime we need story ideas, we pop that folder open," Nadine says, noting it saves her from having to sort through thousands of emails.

Use Gmail stars to triage your emails

If you really want to use your inbox for actionable items instead of moving emails to another app, using Gmail's colorful stars can help you triage incoming emails.

Startup founder Andreas Klinger shares his system, which uses Gmail's Multiple Inbox feature (under Settings > Labs) and special stars. Items that need action get a yellow or read bang (!), those waiting for a reply get a purple question mark, those that are scheduled (such as a flight or event tickets) get a purple star, and those that are delegated get the orange guillmet (double arrow).

This makes it easy to see at a glance what items are in the works. Here's an example, shared on Lifehacker:

Send fewer emails

The constant stream—or perhaps firehose—of incoming email is a source of stress for most of us, but if we look closely, we might find that we're part of the problem. Every email you send has the potential to result in an email response—more clutter for your inbox. Before sending an email, make sure it's necessary and succinct.

TED's Chris Anderson created an "Email Charter" of 10 rules to get us out of this quandry, including:

Slash Surplus cc's

cc's are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly!

and

Cut Contentless Responses

You don't need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying "Thanks for your note. I'm in." does not need you to reply "Great." That just cost someone another 30 seconds.

Instead of defaulting to email, trying moving communication to an app like Slack.

Want to alert your team to something in particular? Instead of managing this information in an annoyingly long, confusing email thread, set up an email address for your team chat app and start forwarding email to it. Once you do, start confidently deleting email knowing that everyone is on the same page.

The folks at FanPrint use this strategy to keep their fast-moving team informed. "When an approval email for a specific apparel design comes in from a college, we have that email sent to a Slack channel called 'Licensor Alert," says TK Stohlman, the company's CEO. "Having the email go to the 'Licensor Alert' channel ensures we see it quickly and can respond or get the product launched instead of having to search through a general email account. We also have key members of our product team on the 'Licensor Alert' channel so they can stay focused in Slack without getting lost in emails."

Likewise, web development firm Ideas Made Digital has significantly trimmed down its team's inboxes by moving conversations from email to the place they belong: a team chat app.

"The Zapier triggers make it incredibly easy for me to segment everything into client channels so each client team can see exactly what is going on. If you set up some Gmail rules and labels and then use Zapier to send to Slack you will be down to inbox zero in no time," says Ross Tavendale, Head of Media at Ideas Made Digital. "It is also really good for sorting out invoices, so I set a label to add anything with 'invoice' in the email to go to a billing channel in Slack that the finance guys pick up."

"For any consulting business looking to do the same, I'd recommend having Zapier pipe everything into one big 'correspondence' channel as it lets you communicate with the team as if it was on Facebook or Twitter, which is a much more intuitive way to communicate," Tavendale adds.

Turn off email notifications, use filters, and unsubscribe from everything you can

You probably get tons of newsletters and notification emails from just about every app and service you use. Yeah, you don't need all of those.

Email notifications from Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter probably aren't urgent, seeing as you can just check for what's new when you open the app.

Similarly, with newsletters, bank statement notifications, and store coupons, you can set up a filter to automatically archive and label those appropriately—keeping them out of your inbox but still accessible. Filters are your friend.

Want to unsubscribe to emails in bulk? Unroll.me is the free app for that. It'll list all your subscription emails and unsubscribe from junk mails in one click.

The Best Apps for Inbox Zero

Better email habits and workflows will be the pinnacle of your new Inbox Zero state of being, but apps can help as well. Here are just a few that can help tame your overflowing inbox.

Sortd: Organize Your Emails into Lists

Sorted adds Kanban organization to your inbox

The hardest part of staying on top of emails is keeping tabs on which ones need action, which you're waiting for a reply on, and which are just reference emails—and seeing them all at the same time. If you're a fan of the Kanban system of organization, you'll likely love Sortd. If Trello and Gmail had a baby, this would be it. The app adds a new interface for Gmail, with an easy way to drag-and-drop emails into flexible lists, so you get a bird's-eye view of your inbox.

Features include subject renaming, adding notes and reminders to emails, email highlighting, and more. And you can quickly switch from Sortd's view to Gmail's default view.

Price: Free for the starter plan, $2/month for the Pro plan, which adds more lists and tasks on your board.

Mailstrom: Clean Up Hundreds of Emails with Little Effort

See the types of emails in your inbox for dealing with them in bulk

Processing emails one at a time isn't efficient when you have a ton of them sitting in your inbox. Mailstrom hopes to make this easier by grouping emails into buckets such as sender, time received, and size. Then you can forward, move, archive, delete, spam, or unsubscribe those emails in bulk.

Three cool features in Mailstrom are only available once you subscribe to the service: Blocking email senders, snoozing emails, or setting a time limit for emails to stay in your inbox, based on the sender.

This app might be best for those who have hundreds or thousands of emails in their inbox and would rather clean that up instead of declaring email bankruptcy and going the email DMZ route.

Price: From $4.95 per month after the free 14-day trial

SaneBox: Sort Emails Automatically

SaneBox moves emails into folders based on their importance

SaneBox is like an email assistant that learns which emails tend to be important to you. Based on your previous emails, it will sort incoming emails into either your inbox or a "SaneLater" folder. The service also creates a daily digest of your unimportant emails, consolidates email notifications into one folder, and lets you snooze emails.

Connect your Gmail account, and SaneBox will immediately start working in the background. In case SaneBox doesn't sort your emails as you would like it to, you can train it by moving emails from the folders back to your inbox.

Price: From $7/month for one email account after the free 14-day trial

Bonus: Automate Your Email Management with Zapier

Zapier isn't designed for only email, since with our tool you can automate tasks for over 750 apps. Still, email management is definitely supported on Zapier—you can do many of the things email-specific apps offer, and then some.

For example, instead of working only with Gmail, you can automate Office 365 (Outlook), Microsoft Exchange, or nearly any other email service using our IMAP integration. Zapier's Email Parser and Mailparser.io integration can automatically extract information from incoming emails.

Check out just a few ways you can automate your inbox. Or sign up for a free Zapier account to get started letting your computer take on those tedious email tasks so you can get to the work that really matters.

Getting to Inbox Zero and maintaining it can feel like an epic achievement, the productivity gods smiling down upon you. But, really, all this takes is building a habit of processing your email efficiently and resisting your inbox's siren call. That and, perhaps, a few new tools in your arsenal.

Got any tips or app recommendations for maintaining Inbox Zero? Share them with us in the comments.

This post is an update from an original written by Alison Groves.

The Zapier Guide to Facebook Lead Ads

emily.irish@zapier.com (Emily Irish) — Mon, 08 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

With more than a quarter of the world's population as users, Facebook has one of the largest online audiences in the world—and an advertising platform to match.

Facebook's ad platform lets advertisers integrate hyper-targeted ads into users' daily news feed experience. Facebook Lead Ads, launched in late 2015, takes it a step further. While the initial ad looks like any other ad, it is combined with a form that's pre-filled with information the user has shared with Facebook, allowing a business to seamlessly capture high quality information from users.

Most ads require viewers to see your ad, click on it, and then fill out a form on your site to send info to your company. Facebook Lead Ads reduces this friction down to one simple click, making it much more likely for users to exchange their information for a coupon, free download, or more information.

In this article, we’ll cover when you should use Facebook Lead Ads, walk you through your first Facebook Lead Ads campaign, and show you how to quickly make the most efficient use of your new Facebook leads.

What is a Facebook Lead Ad?

Facebook offers many different ad types and targets based on your goals as an advertiser. If you’re not sure which one is right for you, consider the objectives for your business' ad campaign.

Each objective has its own goals and best practices. That's why ads are not one-size-fits-all. Several different ad types might be useful for your company, and you can always mix and match different campaigns to find out which work best for you.

Lead generation ads, however, are specifically useful when your goal is to prompt users to apply for something, download something, get a quote, request more information, sign up for a promotion or course, or subscribe to a newsletter.

Perhaps one of the best parts of Facebook Lead Ads is that you do not need a landing page for your ad. Instead, interested viewers will fill in their information directly on Facebook, and you will get their data without ever needing to send them to your website. You can then send them emails, share downloadables, and get in touch any time later.

If this sounds like what your business needs, keep reading and learn how to create your first Facebook Lead Ads campaign.

How to Set Up Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook Lead Ads may seem more daunting to set up than a traditional image or link-based Facebook ad, but they're actually pretty simple to set up once you know how they work.

Your first step is simple: Select your campaign objective and give your campaign a name. To make a Facebook Lead Ad, you’ll want to choose "Lead Generation" as the campaign objective.

At the bottom of the Objective page, you’ll find an option to set a Campaign Spend Limit. This limit sets a budget for your entire campaign. If your campaign meets the budget, your ads will turn off until you raise the budget.

This spend limit can be very useful, especially for beginners, as it adds an extra layer of protection against expensive mistakes. It’s also a useful setting for campaigns with a limited lifespan. However, if you’re running a longer-term campaign, you may want to set a daily spend limit rather than a campaign limit.

Once you’ve completed this step, you’ll move on to the "Ad Set" section of your campaign, where you’ll set up the overall settings for your ads.

First, select the Facebook page you want to promote. When your audience sees your ad in their timeline, this page will appear as the person who "posted" the ad. Make sure your company's Facebook page follows best practices to make your Facebook page engaging and professional, then select it here.

Audience

Facebook’s biggest draw for advertiser’s is the size of their audience (1.8 billion users!) and the ability for advertisers to target these users based on specific criteria like demographics, location, interests, and behaviors. Here are some of the items your ad can target:

Create a Custom Audience. One of the first options you’ll see is the option to create a "custom audience." This is an audience that is created from data you already have. You can use any of the following sources to populate your custom audience: Existing Customer File, Website Traffic, App Activity, and Engagement on Facebook (users who have interacted with your page).

Age & Gender. Chances are you have a good idea of your target audience, including their age and gender. This setting gives you the ability to reach or exclude age & gender demographics specifically.

Location. You can get creative with how you use location, but you also want to be careful. If you’re running a national campaign, for instance, it’s fine to set up one ad set for the entire United States. But say you’re holding a coding bootcamp in several different cities. Even though your branding is consistent across bootcamps, you’ll get better results if you create multiple campaigns for each city. This way, you can more specifically target your audience with local messaging and ad creative (such as a venue address or images of their city skyline featured in the ad).

Detailed Targeting. This is where Facebook’s power features really come into play. This section of the Ad Set enables you to set special parameters on your audience—either by including or excluding people that match a very specific set of criteria. These targeting criteria are broken down into three different categories, and their child-categories:

Demographics: Education, Financial, Generation, Home, Life Event.
Interests: Business & Industry, Entertainment, Family & Relationships, Fitness & Wellness, Food & Drink, Hobbies & Activities, Shopping & Fashion, Sports & Outdoors, Technology.
Behaviors: Anniversary, Automotive, B2B, Charitable Donations, Consumer Classification, Digital Activities, Expats, Financial, Job Role, Media, Mobile Device User, Purchase Behavior, Residential Profiles, Seasonal & Events, Travel.

Connections. This last audience option enables you to target (or exclude) people who are already connected to your page, event, or app in some way.

The amount of data Facebook has is incredible, so definitely take your time to think through the targeting options that best fit your personas and goals. It’s also well worth your time to run ad split tests with different targeting combinations to see which perform better. The insights you gain from these experiments will be invaluable for future advertising.

Placement

Once you’ve created your Audience, you’ll move on to Placement. Here, you will decide where you want Facebook to show your ads. You have two major options:

Automatic Placement. If you select this option, Facebook will place your ads wherever their algorithms determine it will perform the best. This option may return great results, but you’ll want to monitor them to make sure you don’t end up with unprofitable placements.

Edit Placements. Selecting this option will give you the opportunity to manually pick the places you want your ads to appear. For lead ads, you only have the choice of Facebook Feeds (Mobile & Desktop) and Instagram. You can also choose to target Android or iOS devices only.

Budget

When you go to set the budget for your ads, it’s important to understand what you’re actually paying for. For Facebook Lead Ads, you will pay for every ad that is delivered and viewed—charged per "impression," in other words, with delivery prioritized to users who will fill out the form.

You have two options when it comes to setting your bid. The "Automatic" setting lets Facebook set the bid that will get you the most results at the best price. This setting will take into account your daily (or lifetime) budget and set bids accordingly. The "Manual" setting, on the other hand, allows you to choose how much you’re willing to pay for each impression.

Your bid will then compete in an instant auction with other advertisers who are targeting the same audience. As in a physical auction, your bid will be evaluated against others, and the highest bidder will win the most impressions. However, unlike a regular auction, with Facebook, you will only pay the minimum needed to win the auction. (For example, if your max bid is $0.50 and your closest competitor's max bid is $0.25, you will only pay $0.26.)

You’ll also need to decide whether you want to set a Daily Budget or a Lifetime Budget (in addition to any campaign budget you set). A Daily Budget is the spending cap on your ads. When this cap is hit, your ads will stop being shown on Facebook. Facebook does add a caveat, however: If their algorithms see more opportunities to get results on a given day, your campaign may spend more than its daily budget. For example, you may spend up to $25.00 on some days, and less on others to maintain an average daily budget of $20.00.

A Lifetime Budget, on the other hand, is an overall budget—the absolute amount you’re willing to pay for the entire lifetime of the ad. The decision to set this budget should be closely tied to your scheduling decisions.

Schedule

Facebook gives you a choice between simply turning on your ad set and letting it run continuously or scheduling a start and end date. It’s usually advisable to set a start and end date for your ads, especially when you’re starting a new campaign, so that you can review performance and make any needed changes to hone your campaign. This also keeps outdated ads from running indefinitely, should the ad account change hands.

You can customize this schedule further by selecting Delivery Type in Advanced Options, which gives you two options: Standard and Accelerated. "Standard" means that your ads are spaced throughout the day (or, with a "Lifetime" budget, throughout your scheduled date range) to spend your budget evenly. This is the recommended setting for most advertisers, as it enables you to reach your interested audience without spending your budget too quickly.

The "Accelerated" setting, on the other hand, will deliver your ads as quickly as possible. This setting is typically used for time-sensitive promotions or those needing to quickly reach their audience.

Now comes the fun part: Designing your actual ad! Facebook offers many different ad design options for you to choose, so play around with your options and decide which format works best for you. There’s not really a hard and fast rule when picking between single-image, multi-image, and video options—to make that decision, rely on your knowledge of your message and your target audience. (Facebook also has some great guidelines on how to use text in ad images.)

In this last step of the process, you can select pictures or videos and play around with your headlines and text to create the message you want.

To finish off your ad message, choose from six different Call to Action (CTA) buttons:

Apply Now
Download
Get Quote
Learn More
Sign Up
Subscribe

You can specify your tracking parameters for this ad, either through UTM parameters for tracking with Google Analytics or with a Facebook Pixel.

Create Your Lead Form

Last, but not least, you need to create your Lead Form. This is the screen sequence that your audience will see when they click your CTA button. Facebook provides four options for your lead form—three of which are required.

The Welcome Screen is optional, but provides an opportunity for you to add more details about your offer through a headline, image (your ad image or a new image), body text (bullet or paragraph layout), and a customizable CTA button.

Then we get to the meat of the Lead Ad: Questions. Here, you can create or choose the questions you want your leads to answer. Facebook gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating your lead form, but remember that too many requests for information will be off-putting to your prospective lead. Stick to the information you really need. Maybe it’s only name and email (which are auto-filled by Facebook based on profile data). Maybe you need to know a job title and company name for the lead to be valuable. Whatever your unique needs are, just be sure that you keep the process as simple as possible.

Your Privacy Policy is required by Facebook. You will need to provide a link to your privacy policy in order to publish your lead form. You also have the option to add an extra screen—a Custom Disclaimer—that will allow you to add extra Terms & Conditions or disclaimers, beyond a standard Privacy Policy.

Lastly, the Thank You Screen allows you to direct users to your website. Choose a link that’s consistent with the promotion you offered—perhaps a download page or a page with more information on the content in your ad.

Lead Retrieval

So now you’ve set up your campaign, you’ve made your ad, and you’re quite ready for the leads to just pour in. But don’t pour yourself a glass of pinot just yet. You still have one very important question facing you:

What do I do with my Facebook leads?

Up until very recently, if your customer relationship management (CRM) tool wasn’t one of the big systems that provide native integration with Facebook Leads, then your only choice would be to bulk-download your leads into a CSV file or go to Zapier and set up an integration.

Now you can set up Zaps to transfer those new leads to your CRM or email service provider from inside the Facebook Ad Manager. That means you can instantly retrieve your Facebook leads and use the data collected to trigger automated workflows in 750+ apps using Zapier.

After you set up your Lead Form, you’ll see the option to set up your leads to be instantly updated with your CRM. Start by searching for your provider of choice.

Once you select your CRM provider, just click "Connect." The window will prompt you to log into your Zapier account or to create a new account, if you don’t have an account yet.

Your Zapier account will enable you to automatically retrieve your leads and use them to trigger things like autoresponders, welcome sequences, coupon or download delivery, and registrations—and the best part is, you won’t need any coding knowledge to make it work.

Once you’ve connected your accounts, you’re good to go! Your leads will now be automatically imported into your CRM as new leads. From there, you can easily set up workflows that will nurture your relationship with these hot leads.

Really, the best advice we can offer is: Keep testing. Test new audiences, test new copy and images, test new CTAs and shorter forms. Test new Zapier workflows, and test new autoresponder messaging. Facebook Lead Ads offers you a powerful tool to reach your best audience.

Beyond Google Calendar and Apple Calendar: The 18 Best Apps to Manage Your Schedule

melanie.pinola@zapier.com (Melanie Pinola) — Fri, 05 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

A great calendar is like a great personal assistant, keeping your days flowing smoothly. Without them, most of us would miss appointments, forget birthdays, and disregard deadlines.

But no single calendar app is best for everyone. Everyone's workflow is a little different, and our scheduling needs vary. Some want their calendars to be simple and streamlined; others prefer robust, customizable calendar apps that track tasks and notes alongside events.

Your phone and computer already come with a calendar app—but there's an ocean of alternatives that might be better for you. We surveyed that ocean and tested many of the best calendar apps available to help you find a digital assistant for your busy life.

Here are the best tools for tracking events, organizing your day, and sticking to a schedule.

Download Zapier's Calendar Apps Cheat Sheet

Download in PDF Format

Ed note: This post was updated to include Outlook.com

What Makes a Great Calendar App?

Calendar apps have two core functions: They show your upcoming schedule and remind you of important events. The best calendars, however, aren't just functional—they're actually fun to use and help make you more productive.

For this roundup, we looked for apps that were:

Easy to use: If adding an event requires excessive clicking, tapping, or menu exploration, chances are you won’t enjoy using it—if you even use it at all. If you can’t find an upcoming event quickly, you’re also in the weeds. Intuitive, fast apps are the best apps.
Aesthetically pleasing: A beautiful, uncluttered user interface (UI) makes checking your calendar several times a day a pleasant experience. Beyond good looks, the design should help you tell different kinds of events apart and get a bird’s eye view of your schedule.
Simple to share with others: Your calendar events probably involve other people. If you’d like to keep everyone on the same page for those meetups, sharing features—such as easily inviting others to see your calendar or subscribing to published calendars—will be a huge help (and much better than back-and-forth email discussions when planning a date).

We also kept our eye out for apps that are:

Available for multiple devices: A cross-platform calendar app gives you immediate access to your schedule not just on the web but on mobile—and perhaps the desktop too. And all in a consistent, familiar interface.
Customizable, or packed with power features: If you’re a serious scheduler, power features, such as customizable views or integrations with task management apps, will help you get the most out of your calendar.

With these features in mind, here are 18 calendar apps to choose from, sorted according to how they stand out from the other apps.

The Big Three Calendar Apps
The Best Calendar Apps for Quickly Viewing and Entering Events
The Best Calendar Apps for Sharing with Others
The Best Calendar Apps That Also Manage Your Tasks
Bonus: Connect Your Calendar App to Other Apps

The Big Three Calendar Apps

App	Best to:	Platform	Price
Google Calendar	Connect to your calendar on any device with a single Google account	Web, Android, iOS	Free
Apple Calendar	Sharing and syncing calendars across Apple devices	Web, Mac, iOS	Free
Microsoft Outlook	Manage your events, tasks, and email in one place, especially in an office setting	Windows, Mac, Android, iOS	Starts at $6.99/month

Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and Apple Calendar (formerly known as iCal). You’re likely familiar with at least one of these names, and for good reason: They’ve been around a long time and are capable calendars either baked into your computer, phone, or software suite.

They also power the other calendar apps mentioned in the sections below—Google Calendar and Apple Calendar are to calendar apps as Gmail and Apple Mail are to email apps such as Postbox and Thunderbird.

In Google and Apple's cases, they're not just apps, they're also services: Places you enter and store events that other apps can connect to, where you can access and edit those events in a different interface. Some apps also can sync with Outlook's desktop app, as well as Exchange Server, Microsoft's calendar and contacts service for the workforce.

Google Calendar (Web, Android, iOS)

Google Calendar might very well be the most popular calendar app around, according to at least one survey. It’s like the One Calendar to Rule Them All because it lets you keep multiple calendars—for personal, work, holidays, and more—in one place, using your existing Google account (one less login to remember).

If you use an Android device, chances are you already have Google Calendar installed. The color coding for individual calendars makes it easy to see which area of your life an event applies to at-a-glance. You can show or hide calendars for better focus on specific types of events—I hide Google calendars all the time, for example, to see only work-related events and appointments and filter out things like national food holidays. (But I can still find out when Fried Chicken Day is in the U.S. at any time. It’s July 6th—you’re welcome.)

And, of course, Google Calendar sports great search capabilities and integrates with Gmail, as well as Google Apps for Work, so you can create a calendar event from an email or check your co-workers’ schedules alongside your own. Inviting others to your calendar is a cinch too, whether you’re sharing an entire calendar or use the invite option to add people to an event.

Although there’s no desktop app, Google Calendar works with every desktop calendar out there. It also connects to a ton of other types of apps, such as Trello and Asana. For many people, Google Calendar’s web app and mobile apps are enough to keep schedules straight, but if you’d like a more enticing UI or more powerful features, you can use Google Calendar and one of the other apps in this list together for scheduling nirvana.

Google Calendar Pricing: Free

For a deeper look at Google Calendar’s features and pricing, check out our Google Calendar review.

Apple Calendar (Web, Mac, iOS)

Just as Google Calendar is the default calendar on most Android devices, Apple Calendar is built into OS X and iOS. That means you can keep your calendar up-to-date across all your Apple devices and on the web through iCloud (if you set up Apple Calendar to sync through iCould, that is). This ubiquitous app can also pull in other calendars, such as Google Calendar.

Apple Calendar's clean and simple design puts the focus on your events rather than the app itself. It’s also really intuitive to use—at least if you’re used to the way most Apple apps work. Click or tap the plus sign (+) to create a new event, which can include a title, location, reminder, note, plus any invitees. You can even add a travel time estimate that will be factored into event alerts.

Perhaps the best thing about this no-frills calendar is how it integrates with the rest of your system. Alerts show up in the iOS or OS X Today screens and notification bars. If the calendar is open, you can create a quick event with the Command + N keyboard shortcut on the Mac. For example, use that shortcut and type in "School play 7pm on Thursday" to turn it into an event with "School play" as the name of the event and the date and time filled in. Thanks, Calendar!

Apple Calendar Pricing: Free on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad

Microsoft Outlook (Windows, Mac, Android, iOS)

The most stalwart of calendar apps, Microsoft Outlook is more of a personal information manager (PIM) than just a way to see your next appointment. The mobile Outlook apps combine your calendar with email, but the desktop apps take it much further: You get a unified view of your calendar, email, notes, tasks, and contacts. If you like having everything in one place, this is an all-in-one productivity tool to consider.

As part of the Microsoft Office suite used by so many organizations, Outlook shines best when it comes to sharing calendars with teammates. With Exchange Server accounts, team members can easily view each other’s schedules, manage other people’s calendars, and subscribe to other calendars. Outlook also offers nifty ways to view multiple calendars at once: side-by-side or with calendars combined in an overlay view.

Even if you’re not using Outlook within an organization, you might still appreciate the calendar app’s many rich features. Drag and drop an email onto the calendar icon in the navigation menu to turn it into an appointment (available in the Windows app only). Quickly send a meeting request from either email or the calendar. Add multiple time zone views to your calendar. Group calendars together. Customize the default calendar view, colors, and more. There’s a lot to dig into in Outlook.

One downside: The Mac version of Outlook isn’t as robust as the Windows version. However, the subtle color scheme and interface are just as pleasant, with little touches like hovering over an event to see the full details in a popover window.

Microsoft Outlook Pricing: Office 365 subscriptions, which include Microsoft Office with Outlook, start at $6.99/month or $69.99/year. One-time purchases of Office 2016 start at $149.99 (for the Home & Student version). Free on iOS and Android.

Tip: Quickly jump to a date in Outlook for Windows with the Ctrl + G keyboard shortcut.

Outlook.com (Web)

Microsoft also offers a free online version of Outlook, which is more streamlined for just the essential features you might need in a calendar. If you use the web-based versions of Microsoft Office or Outlook.com for email, this calendar will work well within your workflow.

One nice new feature added to the Outlook.com calendar is family sharing. Add adults or children to your Microsoft account, and your new family calendar will be accessible to them.

The Best Calendar Apps for Quickly Viewing and Entering Events

App	Best to:	Platform	Price
Sunrise	Pull in events from all your favorite apps	Web, Android, iOS	Free
Fantastical 2	Easily enter events using natural language	Mac, iOS	$49.99 Mac; $4.99 iPhone; $9.99 iPad
Blotter	Get a bird's eye view of your calendar on the desktop	Mac	9.99
DigiCal	Managing your calendar through customizable widgets	Android	Free; $5 for Pro
Week Calendar	Automatically add icons to events and use templates for quick event creation	iOS	1.99

Like the best alarm clock apps and the best fitness tracking apps, some of the best calendar apps are unobtrusive yet always there when you need them.

Sunrise (Web, Android, iOS)

Update, August 31st, 2016: Microsoft has shut down Sunrise.

Few apps have garnered as much praise as Sunrise. Ellis Hamburger declared on The Verge that Sunrise is the first great calendar app for Android and web. Lifehacker's Thorin Klosowski deemed Sunrise the best calendar app for iPhone. And Kit Eaton named Sunrise his favorite calendar app on The New York Times. That’s just a small sample of the rave reviews that have cropped up since Sunrise launched in 2013.

Sunrise’s secret sauce is its powerful integrations. Not just with the backends from Google, Apple, and Microsoft, but with tons of popular apps, including Facebook, Foursquare, Eventbrite, Trello, TripIt, Asana, Evernote, and GitHub. Your calendar becomes Event Central, pulling in all the other events and event invites scattered across your favorite apps. You can incorporate your to-dos in the Sunrise app, subscribe to interesting calendars, such as sports team schedules, and get pop-ups showing details of an event with just a click or a tap.

Unfortunately, shortly after acquiring Sunrise early in 2015, Microsoft announced it was, well, sunsetting Sunrise. The web and mobile apps will stop working altogether on August 31st.

That’s the bad news. The good news is the old Sunrise team is working on incorporating these kinds of app integrations into Microsoft's Outlook iOS and Android apps.

In the meantime, you can still use the free web app or seek a replacement with one of the also excellent calendar apps below.

Sunrise Pricing: Free

Fantastical 2 (Mac, iOS)

Is it cheesy to call Fantastical 2 fantastic? Probably, but at least in this case it’s not hyperbole. Fantastical 2 has just about everything you want in a calendar app, and it does it all well.

Fantastical 2 is colorful without being gaudy or overwhelming, and it's easy to use without sacrificing control over your event details. The menubar app, which can be docked as a small app on your desktop, lets you quickly add an event or see the next few days of events. The full desktop app lets you manage appointments and reminders full screen, smoothly and quickly adding notes, URLs, invitees, locations, and more. Fantastical 2 also integrates well with the rest of your system, with a Today view widget, Handoff support, and a share extension that lets you create events from other apps, such as from addresses in Maps and URLs in Safari.

Fantastical 2 is most renowned, though, for its natural-language event creation. Start typing "Lunch with Casey at noon at Park Place" and watch as the app parses your words into calendar fields and pulls in relevant information, such as addresses and team members’ availability.

The natural language parsing means you can interact with the calendar app as infrequently as you want to and still create events without having to think like a computer. $50 is a hefty price to pay for a calendar app, but if you live in your calendar, it’s a worthy replacement for the default Apple Calendar app.

Fantastical 2 Pricing: $49.99 for Mac (after 21-day free trial), $4.99 for iPhone, $9.99 for iPad

Blotter (Mac)

Blotter is a beautiful calendar that blends in with your desktop. A quick glance tells you what’s coming up this week, what you have scheduled for right now, and what to-dos you want to be reminded of.

Blotter sits on top of your desktop wallpaper to display your calendars from Apple Calendar. It’s not as customizable as other calendar apps—you have limited calendar views (weekly rather than monthly views) and limited settings. It’s mostly a view-only calendar overlay, but you can add notes and reminders to that overlay.

All in all, it's handy for taking a peek at your upcoming engagements.

Blotter Pricing: $9.99

Tip: Press the F11 key to quickly show the Mac’s desktop—while also showing your week’s events in Blotter.

DigiCal Calendar (Android)

Android-only DigiCal is all about customization. Want to quickly switch from day or week view to an agenda view? Check. Toggle between an Exchange calendar and Google Calendar? Check. Customize widgets by theme or size? Check.

This mobile calendar offers options galore. In addition to seven views (day, week, agenda, month, text month, list, and year), you have multiple options for styling how events look. For example, there are more than two dozen colors to choose for events and several ways to change how past events look.

Perhaps DigiCal’s most intriguing features, though, are its resizable and customizable widgets. They let you check your calendar from your phone’s homescreen and quickly add new events, and there are over 20 widgets to choose from!

In short, DigiCal is a flexible tool perfect for those who want to tweak how their calendars look, right down to choosing among royal blue, cyan, and azure for their event colors. The pro version removes ads and unlocks even more widgets, 42 theme colors, and more customization options.

DigiCal Pricing: Free for ad-supported version, $5 for the pro version

Week Calendar (iOS)

Week Calendar doesn’t offer as many views as other calendar apps—only the standard day, week, month, and year views. However, it is packed with useful features, such as autocomplete, multiple alarms, and a widget. It works with all calendar services supported by iOS, including iCal, Google, Outlook, and Exchange. With dozens of settings options, this calendar app is for power users, but it’s also fast and easy to use.

It’s a cinch, for example, to tap through to different weeks or months with the navigation bar at the bottom. Or tap an event to quickly see and edit details. The app’s calendar templates are awesome: Set up an event once with details like location, time, and alarms, and then you can create new events from the template in seconds.

My favorite Week Calendar feature is the incorporation of icons in the calendar events. You can have a birthday cake icon automatically added to an event if it has "birthday" in the title or a Statue of Liberty icon added when the event location contains "New York." These make it easy to get the insights you need from your calendar even when your schedule is packed.

There is a slight learning curve if you want to make use of all of the app’s functionality, but it’s worth it if you’re looking for a powerful calendar and would enjoy emoji in your events.

Week Calendar Pricing: $1.99. In-app purchases of $0.99 to $1.99 add additional calendars you can subscribe to.

The Best Calendar Apps for Sharing with Others

App	Best to:	Platform	Price
aCalendar+	Flexible calendar views and sharing options	Android	4.99
Cal	Sharing your calendar with contacts and social media connections	Android, iOS	Free
Cozi	Family organization and scheduling	Web, Android, iOS, Windows App	Free; $19.99 for Cozi Gold
VueMinder Pro	Complete calendar customization and sharing calendars on a local network	Windows	Free; $49.95 for Pro; $79.95 for Ultimate
SmartDay	Combining events with shared tasks management	Web, Mac, Android, iOS	Free on the web; $29.99 for Mac; $9.99 for iOS; $4.99 for Android

Most calendars offer a way to share your schedule with others or subscribe to shared calendars. Some apps, however, take calendar sharing beyond the basics, almost turning your calendar into a collaborative tool.

The apps below function well as regular calendar apps, but incorporate additional sharing features like public calendar links so you can share your availability with the world.

aCalendar+ (Android)

aCalendar combines different ways to look at your schedule in one screen: There’s a hybrid day and week view, for example, and a combined month and agenda widget. If your current calendar app doesn’t support the way you’d like to view your upcoming events, aCalendar is worth a try for this flexibility alone.

Upgrade to aCalendar+ for $4.99, and you can tap into additional calendar features particularly suited for teams and calendar sharing. Set your busy, available, or tentative status, link contacts to your events, share events via QR code, and set up different calendar profiles.

aCalendar is plenty flexible on its own, and emphasizes birthdays and anniversaries in its event creation screens, but the premium version is even better for organizing your schedule.

aCalendar+ Pricing: $4.99.

Cal (Android, iOS)

From the makers of the intelligent Any.do task management app comes this similarly streamlined calendar app, simply called Cal. It sports an uncluttered interface with gorgeous photo backgrounds and connects instantly to your contacts and Facebook account.

When adding an attendee to an event, for example, Cal searches your contacts and social connections for their details. You can quickly email or text message others from the app by tapping the convenient buttons in the event details. The app can also predict contacts for your appointments and suggest nearby meeting places.

Cal is a minimalistic, beautiful calendar app that integrates with your social networks and intelligently fills in appointment details when you start typing in a location or attendee’s name.

Cal Pricing: Free

Cozi (Web, Android, iOS, Windows App)

Family schedules are hectic schedules—band practice one morning, soccer practice for your youngest another day, constantly conflicting appointments for you and your significant other. Cozi is designed for busy families in mind, consolidating multiple calendars, to-do lists, and shopping lists in one app. Think of it like the old-school bulletin board and physical family calendar hanging in the kitchen, just smarter and pocket-sized.

Calendars are color-coded by family member, and the app works across devices via the web app or Android, iOS, or Windows Phone. In addition to the contacts, shopping, to-do lists, journal, and messages features, Cozi helps you create meal plans and grocery lists. (The most torturous time of the day, for me at least, is the "what’s for dinner?" time.)

Basically, it’s a family organizer each member can use. I can add "laundry detergent" to our shared shopping list for my husband to check before checkout, and he can share his scheduled time off in the shared calendar.

Cozi Pricing: Free; $19.99 for Cozi Gold, which removes ads and includes more calendar views, more reminders and themes, and shared contacts and shared schedules.

VueMinder Pro (Windows)

VueMinder is one of the most powerful calendars around. It’s like Microsoft Outlook on steroids: more customizable and packing more features and options, including viewing your calendar on your desktop, automatic backups, and reminders via email, SMS, desktop alerts, or even text-to-speech.

Initially, I was going to put VueMinder in the PIM category below, because the desktop program can also organize your contacts, notes, and tasks. One standout feature, however, that separates VueMinder from other calendars is its sharing capabilities.

In addition to syncing with Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple Calendar, Exchange, and all the other major calendar services, you can sync calendars with your local network. You’ll need the Pro or Ultimate license to do this, but it’s an easy way to share events with other computers—changes made on one computer will be reflected in the other.

The Ultimate version lets you sync tasks, notes, contacts, and custom data. As such, VueMinder is a less expensive alternative to using Microsoft Exchange for small offices and workgroups. You can also save calendars as web pages, control event permissions (for example, who's allowed to delete events), and email your calendar as an ICS file.

Although the learning curve is steep with VueMinder, it’s worth a try if you want to share calendars over your local network or you just demand more out of your calendar.

VueMinder Pricing: Free; $49.95 for Pro; $79.95 for Ultimate

SmartDay (Web, Mac, Android, iOS)

SmartDay is one part calendar and one part project manager. Add events, tasks, and notes in either the web app, Mac app, or mobile app, and then share them with others.

SmartDay is all about collaboration. Comments can be added to any shared event or task. You can set different permissions for tasks and events, and tasks can be delegated to team members, which automatically schedules them in the individual's calendar. You can even share projects publicly through social media.

Perhaps the neatest feature of SmartDay is its automatic task scheduling. Enter tasks for your various projects into your list, and SmartDay will place them on your calendar in the free time between your appointments.

The calendar features themselves are limited. You get a fixed view, for example, with tasks and agenda view on the left, a day view, and a mini calendar. SmartDay probably won’t replace your main calendar, but if you’re looking for a simple way to share events, tasks, and notes, this integrated calendar can help.

SmartDay Pricing: Free on the web; $29.99 for Mac; $9.99 for iOS; $4.99 for Android

The Best Calendar Apps That Also Manage Your Tasks

App	Best to:	Platform	Price
BusyCal 2	Tracking events, to-dos, notes, and journal entries in one place	Mac	49.99
Jorte	Customization on mobile devices and tons of event calendars you can subscribe to	Web, Android, iOS, Windows Phone	Free; $1.99-$2.99 for premium plans
Thunderbird	Excellent email features along with strong calendar search	Windows, Mac	Free
Calendars 5	Simple and intuitive calendar and tasks management	iOS	6.99
Business Calendar 2	Robust to-do lists along with customizable events views	Android	Free; $4.99 for Pro

Some calendar apps aren’t just about appointments and events, they’re about organizing almost every aspect of your day to day life, incorporating tasks and notes into one system. If you’re not a fan of switching between a calendar app, a notes app, and a to-do app, these tools can simplify your workflow.

BusyCal 2 (Mac)

BusyCal 2 is a full-featured calendar app offering customizable calendar views, custom font styles, and image embedding. It syncs with iCloud, Google Calendar, and other CalDAV servers. You can even share calendars over a local network with other BusyCal users, which is great for families and small workgroups.

BusyCal incorporates much more than just events into the calendar. You can track to-dos (including recurring tasks), which sync with the Reminders app on the Mac and iPhone/iPad. Plus, you can create journal entries, and add sticky notes to the calendar.

This all-in-one tool is highly customizable and offers multiple ways to view your calendars and events. You can group calendars, use filters to display events that match only certain criteria, and create saved searches. With these search tools, finding all the events related to a specific project couldn’t be any quicker.

This isn’t a calendar for people who feel overwhelmed by options. It’s for people who want a calendar app that’s smart enough to back itself up automatically every day, let you create an almost infinite number of alarms (and snooze them for any amount of time), and much more.

The calendar takes center stage here—and the to-do and journal features aren’t as strong as dedicated apps—but if you want an easy way to combine multiple productivity tools in one place, give BusyCal a try. Like Fantastical 2, it comes with a hefty price tag, but with similarly unique features.

BusyCal 2 Pricing: $49.99

Jorte Calendar (Web, Android, iOS, Windows Phone)

Online and mobile calendar Jorte combines tasks and memos with events, much like paper organizers or planners do. It syncs with Google Calendar, iOS, Yahoo!, and Office 365.

When it comes to the calendar features and tasks and memos, Jorte is a no-frills app on the web. It does what you’d expect from a calendar app that also doubles as an organizer. Tasks and memos are listed unobtrusively next to (or, on mobile, below) the calendar view. You can mark tasks as important, set a start date and a due date, and add task notes. You can add other event calendars to your calendar, such as US holidays, and view your calendar in a unique monthly list view, with several months’ events listed in columns.

Jorte, however, stands out most on mobile. There, it’s a highly customizable calendar app, with a variety of resizable widgets available, multiple font and icon choices, the ability to add photos to events, and a ton of themes.

Upgrade to the Plus plan to turn off ads and get passcode lock, the Buffet plan for more icons and themes, or the Premium plan for unique features such as a secret calendar and attaching notes from Evernote to events.

Jorte Pricing: Free; $3.99/year for Jorte Plus; $1.99/month for Jorte Buffet; $2.99/month for Jorte Premium

Thunderbird (Windows, Mac)

Want your events to mingle with your calendar and tasks? Mozilla’s Thunderbird desktop email client incorporates a calendar, tasks manager, and more.

Access calendars and tasks in new tabs in the program to easily switch from emailing mode to planning mode. The calendar offers four different views (day, week, multi-week, and month), a convenient search function with time filters, and built-in categories for events, such as "birthday" and "calls."

Although there’s nothing overwhelmingly unique about the calendar built into the program, Thunderbird’s customizable and powerful email capabilities are worth a look on their own. And then you can get scheduling and task management in one convenient package.

Thunderbird Pricing: Free

Calendars 5 (iOS)

Calendars 5 organizes both events and tasks in an intuitive, elegant interface. You can sync your Google Calendar or Apple Calendar with the app.

In the calendar views, your events are front-and-center, without distracting menus some other calendar apps sport. Creating a new event is quick and simple: Tap the plus (+) icon and enter your event using everyday language ("Pick up dry cleaning at 5pm tomorrow"). Little details, such as weekend day numbers colored red and weekday numbers in black, make this calendar pleasant to use.

Task management is simple in Calendars 5 too. You can add tasks to color-coded categories, sync them with the Reminders app, and set custom recurring tasks, such as "repeat every four days".

If you’re looking for an uncluttered, yet perfectly capable calendar and tasks manager, add Calendars 5 to your list of contenders.

Calendars 5 Pricing: $6.99

Business Calendar 2 (Android)

Tasks, meet events. Business Calendar 2 is one of the most customizable and versatile mobile calendar apps around. Not only do you get a day, week, month, and yearly views, the app offers multiple views within those categories. You can view the current month, for example, with either event titles shown or with bars illustrating your appointments and events. You can get customized notifications with links to relevant actions such as showing a map. And you can tweak what’s shown in the widgets to your heart’s desire.

That versatility extends to Business Calendar 2’s handling of tasks as well. Tasks are incorporated into every calendar view, and you can create multiple task lists. Best of all, you can sync your tasks with your Google account to access them from any device.

If you want more robust to do management, upgrade the app for repeating tasks, subtasks, priorities, and even auto-creating tasks for missed calls. You can buy the Advanced Tasks package separately or the complete Pro package, which includes additional features such as advanced widgets, themes, and templates.

Business Calendar Pricing: Free; $1.99 for Advanced Tasks package; $4.99 for Pro, which adds all advanced features

Bonus: Connect Your Calendar to Other Apps

As nice as your calendar app might be to look at and use, you won't want to spend all your time entering, updating, or sharing events. Your calendar doesn't have to work in isolation, either. Automate your calendar and connect your favorite apps with Zapier, an app integration tool that works with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook on Office 365, Trello, Google Sheets, Todoist, Evernote, and more.

Once you connect your calendar to Zapier, it'll keep an eye out for things like new events you create in Google Calendar or new notes with reminders you create in Evernote–and then it triggers an action in another app. For example, each time you add a new event in Google Calendar, Zapier can automatically post a reminder of that event to a Slack channel. Or each time you create a new task in Todoist, Zapier can create a new event for it on Google Calendar.

Here are a few ways you can spend less time managing your calendar and more time on your most important work.

Get Alerts for Upcoming Events in Google Calendar Everywhere

Copy Calendar Events

Get Notifications for New Events Added to a Shared Calendar

Add New Events to a Calendar

Whether you check your calendar every hour or just glance at it occasionally, each of these calendar apps can help. They'll give you a better handle on your day and future. And don't limit yourself to one calendar app—calendars are such an essential productivity tool, go ahead and try a new one if you need more robust features.

Your turn! What’s your favorite calendar app and why?

Title photo remixed from originals by Zlatko Najdenovski via Noun Project.

Zapier for Nonprofits: 14 Ways to Do More on a Limited Budget

emily.irish@zapier.com (Emily Irish) — Thu, 04 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

A nonprofit that stops human trafficking. A charity that offers free mental healthcare to veterans. An organization that plants trees in Washington, DC. Though their missions might be different, these nonprofit organizations have one thing in common: They use technology to do more with limited resources.

YouthSpark, The Soldier Project, and Casey Trees, for example, use Zapier to automate their daily tasks and get more done even with budget and personnel restraints. Here's how 12 nonprofits use automated workflows to help solve societal and organizational problems.

Budget-Friendly Tech Solutions
Manage and Organize Your Events
Cut Out the Busywork
Spend Less Time on Your Marketing and More Time on Your Mission

Budget-Friendly Tech Solutions

"Zapier has completely transformed our ability to support our volunteers and deliver our mission."Action for Happiness

Small, local nonprofits often feel the squeeze of a tight budget dependent on donations or grants. But you don’t need a huge team or the latest and greatest CRM to have a big impact on a small budget—you just need the right workflows.

Build the Systems You Need on the Cheap

Your budget also shouldn’t limit you from using software that will empower your team to do their best work.

Creighton Community Foundation is an inner-city nonprofit in Phoenix, AZ that partners with schools to structure student-to-community engagement and enrichment. For example, one of the organization's projects is the Parent-Teacher Organization Incubator, which equips schools with the initial guidance, talent, and financial resources to start up meaningful PTOs that achieve sustainability and create an impact.

As you might imagine, this entails tracking a lot of information and connections, and top-of-the-line software for this is often outside a nonprofit's budget.

Zapier enables us to leverage cost-effective nonprofit friendly (free or nearly free) tools and still build integrated information systems—from tracking donations to tracking community points of contact—without huge investments in overly complex software.

If we weren't using Zaps, I suspect we'd have pretty fragmented information silos with lots of contacts and interactions falling through the cracks.

Try Creighton Community Foundation's workflows with Insightly, Donately, and Constant Contact!

Manage and Organize Your Events

"Zapier saves us time and lets us get back to what we do best."The Soldiers Project

In the whirlwind of modern life—and especially modern business—I think we all find ourselves wishing for our very own personal assistant to schedule our lives. But since most of us can’t afford that, here’s the next best thing: quick workflows to make your events apps work smarter and harder for you.

Streamline Registrations

Most customer relationship management (CRM) apps don’t have good event registration options, and most event apps don’t have a good way of keeping track of contacts and relationships. For example, Natasha Medina, National Program Director of The Soldiers Project, which provides free mental health services to post-9/11 military veterans and their loved ones, says "Our data was living in three separate platforms and we had to manually enter the information from one platform to another."

This data was mostly for their training registrations, and Natasha and her crew were registering attendees in each separate platform to keep the information accurate and synced.

Now, they use Zaps to connect Eventbrite to Anymeeting and Anymeeting to Salesforce. Their entire registration process now runs automatically.

Zapier allows all the data to be streamlined into Salesforce. It saves staff time because it eliminates the need to manually enter information from one platform to another and lets staff get back to what The Soldiers Project does best - providing free mental health services to post 9/11 veterans through our network of volunteer mental health professionals.

Try the Soldiers Project’s Eventbrite and Anymeeting workflows!

Collaborate with Your Team

Collaborating with team members, volunteers, and vendors is a must for pulling off a successful event. But an event taskforce is only as good as its information and, let’s face it—it’s tough to efficiently keep everyone up to date.

Rick Frye, Director of Finance & Communication at Denver’s North Metro Church, used to spend a lot of time updating event organizers, and they still weren’t getting the data processed quickly enough.

"As a church," Frye says, "we have lots of events and activities for people to register for. I was using two or three different form tools, each with their own way of exporting data, and I had to export form entries to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet, then email that to event organizers, typically once a week until the event was over."

Setting up a simple workflow saved him and his team a lot of time. Rick explains their new process: "I use Zaps to capture form data from Wufoo and populate the results in a Google Sheet. This combination has saved me time because I only have to share a Google Sheet with the event organizers. No longer do I have to download a CSV once a week."

Try North Metro’s Wufoo workflow!

Organize Volunteers and Donors

Casey Trees is a nonprofit in Washington, DC focused on restoring, enhancing, and protecting the tree canopy of the nation's capital. Every year, they organize several tree planting events, tree care events, tree education, advocacy and appreciation events, as well as a "Canopy Awards" event on Arbor Day Eve.

With over 5,000 people volunteering or attending their events each year , Casey Tree has a lot of contacts to track! And as they quickly found out, there is no high-performing application that moves Eventbrite info into Salesforce. So they’re using Zapier to fill the void.

"We would often reconcile event data after an event through a manual data upload," says Casey Trees’ Data Manager/CRM Admin, Vince Drader. "Though this worked, it was not ideal. Employees had to look at Eventbrite for event specifics leading up to the event, and event information was not input into our CRM database until the Monday or Tuesday after the event."

"Now," he says, "Our Zaps allow us to see what contacts are attending what events, and allow us to start interacting with our volunteers and donors immediately and more efficiently. Our constituents appreciate the quick communication and specific content we can provide them, and we’re able to plan our programs more effectively."

Try Casey Trees' Eventbrite to Salesforce workflow!

Cut Out the Busywork

"Zaps are like hired developers for our organization. They save us tremendous time, since we have many apps we need to integrate with."Thrive Ministry

To charity staffers, we want to say a big thank you for dedicating your time and talent to making the world a better place. We also want to remind you to protect yourself from burnout. Just because you’re on a budget doesn’t mean you can’t outsource the work that drains your team resources.

Your human resources, whether staff or volunteers, are too precious to be wasted on busywork. If you find yourself doing a lot of menial tasks, ask yourself—"could a computer be doing this job?" A lot of times, the answer will be yes, and we’re here to help you transfer that busywork to an automated system.

To get you started, here are some ways several different NPOs have created workflows to get rid of busywork and refocus on their mission.

Before Action for Happiness, a small organization that helps people create happier lives and communities, started using Zapier, their process was "time-consuming, prone to errors, and took talented people's time up when they could have been doing more useful and value-adding things."

Now, they tell us, "Zapier is like having 5 extra team members doing all the tasks that we would otherwise have to do manually, like following up bookings, replying to emails, storing survey responses and adding people to mailing campaigns."

Scott Ballard, Technology Director of The Village Church, leads a team that serves all ministry teams across multiple locations with their technology, communications, facilities, finance, and HR needs. Their go-to apps are Formstack, Liquid Planner, Trello, and Slack.

"These Zaps have allowed us to use one form that captures various needs and automatically feeds those request into the various systems our teams use to manage tasks," Scott said. "The person submitting never has to worry about it getting to where it needs to go."

Mina Jones, General Manager at Piper Theatre Productions, uses a Gravity Forms to Google Sheets Zap for friction-free student registration. Before using these Zaps, she told us she would manually download Gravity form data and manually paste into Google Sheets.

"These Zaps have reduced manual entry ten-fold, ensuring accuracy, saving time, and enabling us to keep all our data relating to registration up-to-date."Piper Theatre Productions

As one of only two directors for a growing nonprofit that mentors teen boys, Nicky Wilks, Executive Director of Journeymen, was caught in a cycle of menial tasks, repetitious delegations, and the black hole of his inbox.

"As Executive Director, I don't want to spend all of my time pushing paper and doing admin tasks," Nicky told us. "My passion is and always will be working directly with youth. Zapier's tight and seamless integration of all of our core services allows me to trust that all of our pieces are moving in sync and offers me the time, space and life energy to show up in my most important role: a father and a mentor."

Emmett Harris is the Treasurer for the Free State Project, a nonprofit, educational organization that promotes liberty, free markets, and the state of New Hampshire. They use Zapier to automate thank-you replies to their donors, track details for independent contractor invoice submissions, and other tasks that help them add additional details to expenses and event ticket sales.

Spend Less Time on Your Marketing and More Time on Your Mission

"We would try to update our databases once a year, but that meant we were missing out on valuable contacts and the context of those contacts most of the year."Mixed Remixed Festival

Palm Beach Tech Association has the mission of uniting and building the innovation, entrepreneurial, and technology industries throughout Palm Beach County. One of the ways they do this is by offering a local career board to engage with the community.

This was a tedious process, with staff or volunteers manually updating Palm Beach Tech’s many social networks. Now, if someone submits a job to their career board, they automatically send an update over to their Palm Beach Tech Facebook Page, Facebook Group, Twitter, Slack, and LinkedIn Accounts, in addition to their director’s personal social media—all at once!.

"Social media was very hands on, all managed by staff, interns, and volunteers. Now we can do literally 8 things with one click, saving time and effort."Palm Beach Tech Association

Social media, and marketing in general, can easily become a huge time sink for NPOs who rely on volunteers (often untrained) to manage accounts. And while you won’t be able to hand all your marketing duties over to the robots, you can find the smart shortcuts that free your mind to focus on the content of your marketing.

Email Marketing

Cut out the middleman between your leads and your email marketing system. Import your leads instantly from your lead generation source, whether it's a form, a scheduling app, an event… you name it.

Facebook Lead Ads

Many advertisers find that Facebook Lead Ads offer the best cost per acquisition (CPA) in their advertising arsenal. However, since only a very few CRMs provide native integrations with Facebook Lead Ads, most advertisers have to manually download and import their leads before they become useable.

Luckily, there is another way. Zapier's Facebook Lead Ads integration allows you to automatically retrieve leads directly from Facebook Ad Manager and add them to your favorite CRM apps, email lists, and more.

Share New Content on Social Media

One of the best ways to impact your community and attract volunteers and donors is to share content that your followers will find interesting. Here's how you can automatically post more content and help grow your following (with less effort on your part):

Promote Upcoming Events

Whether you’re promoting community activities or your annual fundraising event, just create a new event in your calendar or a meeting app like Meetup or Eventbrite, and Zapier will take care of the rest by sharing your events on your social networks.

Monitor Your Brand Online

Interacting with your followers is an important way to build a community around your cause. But sifting through pages and pages of links to find legitimate brand mentions isn’t an option when you’re a small team. Tools like Mention, along with Zapier's social media integrations, can help monitor social networks for you automatically.

Changing "the way we’ve always done things" is never easy, but if the status quo is slowing down your team or burning out your staff, you know change is necessary. Hopefully these stories of organizations like yours have shown you that change also doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. It can actually save you time and money.

And from the whole Zapier team—thank you for all your hard work to better your community, society, and the world.

Learn More: the Best Free or Inexpensive Business Apps

Great SaaS companies like Salesforce, Buffer, and Evernote offer hefty discounts for nonprofits—check out the 11 best software discounts for nonprofits.
Looking for a solid CRM at the very reasonable price of… free? Check out our roundup of the 25 Best Free CRM Apps
Manage projects without breaking the bank, using one of the 18 Best Free Project Management Apps.
Capture data in style with one of the 12 Best Free Survey Tools and Form Apps
Track volunteer and staff time with one of the 20 Best Time-Tracking Apps. Many of these apps are free or have good free plans.
Have a remote team or need to communicate with sponsors, donors, or your community? We rounded up the 12 Best Video Conferencing Apps for Teams, and many are free up to a certain number of users.
Wanting to network or find potential donors, sponsors, and volunteers? With these 12 apps and tips, you can find any email address in minutes.

The Best Software Discounts for Nonprofit Organizations

emily.irish@zapier.com (Emily Irish) — Wed, 03 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

Running an organization isn’t cheap. With budget and personnel restrictions, it's often hard to get the latest technology approved or prioritized.

For nonprofit organizations who are doing the valuable work of improving society, we’re trying to change that, and we’re not alone. Zapier offers a 15% discount to help nonprofits build automated workflows between apps so they can save time and resources. Our goal is to pay it forward, and many of our partners feel the same way.

These 12 companies offer great discount programs for nonprofits, so that your organization can stay on the cutting edge without breaking the bank.

Create and Collaborate with G Suite
Save Time on Social Media with Buffer
Update Followers and Attract Donors with MailChimp
Organize Volunteers, Followers, and Donors in Salesforce
Produce Great Fundraising Events with Eventbrite
Accept Friction-Free Donations via PayPal
Find Top Staff and Volunteer Talent with LinkedIn
Share Knowledge and Connect Your Team with Evernote Business
Keep Your Business in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services
Increase Conversion Rate with Visual Website Optimizer
Run Your Business with Zoho
Find More Resources on TechSoup

Create and Collaborate with G Suite

Free for non-profits

G Suite gives you the business versions of all your favorite Google apps, as well as email addresses that use your organization’s .com or other domain address (vs the standard @gmail). For your organization’s IT admins, G Suite comes with some extra G Suite sharing and management tools to help your team work together better and keep your data secure.

As part of their Google for Nonprofits program, Google offers G Suite free to verified nonprofits. This program also offers promotional and fundraising tools:

Google Ad Grants gives nonprofits $10,000 in Google AdWords credits every month, to help raise awareness.
YouTube Nonprofit Program offers nonprofits exclusive advertising tools to drive donations within YouTube’s platform.
Google One Today is Google’s proprietary fundraising platform that corresponds to their One Today mobile app. The app enables people to support causes they care about with just a few taps and with as little as $1—magnifying the impact of small donors.
Google Earth Outreach is a fun, visual tool that helps you inspire your community by bringing your organization’s story to life with custom maps and location information.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: Free
See Google integrations on Zapier for Docs, Sheets, Forms, Gmail, and Drive

Save Time on Social Media with Buffer

50% discount on paid plans

Buffer connects to all of your social media accounts, for an easy way to compose and schedule posts. Rather than logging into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ every day, simply log into Buffer once and let it post for you on a schedule that you define. (Don’t want to choose your own times? Take advantage of Buffer’s Optimal Scheduling tool!)

For the small nonprofit staff strapped for time or the volunteer who’s trying to manage social media in their spare time, Buffer is a lifesaver. The app's simple interface makes it easy for even the non-tech-savvy to get started, while their more advanced features offer plenty of analytics and tools for the more seasoned social media manager.

The best part? Buffer is giving back to society by offering a hefty discount for nonprofits on all their paid plans.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: 50% off all paid plans
See Buffer integrations on Zapier: Buffer your Wordpress posts, Buffer new items in an RSS feed, Buffer new tagged Pocket items, and more

Update Followers and Attract Donors with MailChimp

15% discount for nonprofits & charities

MailChimp is email marketing made simple. What started as just another way to send email newsletters has grown into an app with 6 million users that collectively send over 10 billion emails each month.

Choose from dozens of beautiful templates, or create your own designs. Send emails automatically from an RSS feed. Trigger an automated email or email series to based on goals and events like new subscribers or customers. Then, track all your email marketing efforts with the easy visuals of MailChimp’s analytics.

If you want a comprehensive email marketing app that doesn’t have a steep learning curve, you probably want MailChimp. And MailChimp wants to make that easy for you. They’re offering a 15% discount on their paid plans to help your nonprofit or charity create awesome emails without breaking the bank.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: 15% discount on paid plans for nonprofits & charities
See MailChimp integrations on Zapier: Create MailChimp subscribers from Typeform entries, subscribe new Facebook Lead Ads leads to a MailChimp list, create or update HubSpot contacts from new MailChimp subscribers, and more

Organize Volunteers, Followers, and Donors in Salesforce

10 free licenses; 76% off additional licenses

Salesforce is one of the most powerful and popular customer relationship marketing (CRM) tools out there today—and with good reason. In Salesforce, you’ll get detailed analytics with customizable reports on anything you want to keep tabs on, along with forecasting that’ll help you plan the future of your organization based on recent donations and growth. There are customizable permissions and workflows, marketing automation to help you pick out the best leads automatically, and special consoles and dashboards for each of the different parts of your team so everyone can work the way that makes the most sense to them. And that’s only scratching the surface.

Salesforce’s Power of Us program was built to pay it forward, offering Salesforce’s full features for free for up to 10 enterprise user licenses. That’s $15,000 worth of Salesforce service for free.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: 10 free licenses, discounted training & support, 76% off additional licenses.
See Salesforce integrations on Zapier: Get Slack messages for new Salesforce opportunities, save all new Wufoo entries as leads in Salesforce, add new Facebook Lead Ads leads to Salesforce, and more

Produce Great Fundraising Events with Eventbrite

Transaction fee discounted by 20%

No one app can handle everything for your next event, but Eventbrite at least makes sure the marketing and attendee management is taken care of, so you can focus on the event itself.

Eventbrite is a feature-rich event organization tool that can adapt to almost any specialization you need. You can add a waitlist to events to consider opening up more seats, create paid events complete with coupon codes and VIP access, manage seating for your attendees, make name badges, and much more. You can also automatically send emails to all your registrants whenever you want.

Eventbrite is one of the go-to softwares for event organization, which makes it popular with many nonprofits. If you’re hosting a free event, Eventbrite’s full suite of features is available completely free. For paid events (such as a fundraising gala), Eventbrite offers a reduced service fee of 2.0% + $0.99 per ticket sold (compared to 2.5% + $0.99). They do offer tools that allow you to pass this service fee to the buyer, however—a cost most nonprofit supporters would be willing to pay.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: service fee of 2.0% + $0.99 (a 20% discount)
See Eventbrite integrations on Zapier: Connect Eventbrite to Google Sheets, Salesforce, MailChimp, and more

Accept Friction-Free Donations via PayPal

Transaction fee discounted by 24%

PayPal has become a primary way for consumers to make online payments over the last decade. Users love having a safe, simple way to pay online; businesses love the friction-free transactions that PayPal offers. To give back a little love, PayPal is making it easier for nonprofits to raise funds and accept donations through PayPal.

With reduced transaction fees, no monthly fees, and a library of resources for nonprofits, PayPal is making it easy for nonprofits to start fundraising on the web’s most popular online payment system.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: 2.2% + $0.30 per transaction (a 24% discount)
.
See PayPal integrations on Zapier. Get notifications for new sales in Slack, add new rows in Google Sheets for new PayPal sales, thank PayPal buyers via automatic emails, and more

Find Top Staff and Volunteer Talent with LinkedIn

90% off for job postings

To make the biggest impact in your community, you need skilled, hardworking staff and volunteers. LinkedIn for Nonprofits wants to support your mission by helping you employ the best people possible. According to the company, 76% of LinkedIn members are interested in working at a nonprofit.

That’s why LinkedIn makes it possible for nonprofits to post volunteer and employment opportunities at barely a fraction of what it costs businesses to do the same.
- Nonprofit Discount Pricing: 90% discount on job postings

See LinkedIn integrations on Zapier: Post new Eventbrite events to LinkedIn, share new blog posts on LinkedIn, share Facebook Pages posts to LinkedIn, and more

Share Knowledge and Connect Your Team with Evernote Business

75% discount on Evernote Business

Evernote Business is the workplace version of Evernote, the popular note-taking application that allows you to capture ideas, images, contacts, webpages, and anything else you want to remember. The Business version of Evernote centralizes documents, conversations, meeting or call notes, and more, all in one easily accessible hub.

Evernote Business has all of the features of the personal version, then additionally lets you share and discover team knowledge in shared notebooks and workspaces. Employees are given access to the Business Home, the central hub of your organization’s information. Here, users can see all their business notes, as well as notes shared by coworkers or those shared company wide. They can browse and join notebooks that are relevant to them, view coworker’s profiles, and see any recent activity.

For non-governmental nonprofits and educational institutions, Evernote offers a discounted version of Evernote Business, so you can keep your team in sync without breaking the bank.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: 75% discount on Evernote Business for teams of 5 users or more
See Evernote Business integrations on Zapier: Add new Trello cards to Evernote Business, add new Google Calendar events to Evernote, create Evernote notes from new Gmail, and more

Run Your Business in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services

$2,000 in AWS credits

Tens of thousands of nonprofits and not-for-profit non-governmental organizations worldwide have flocked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the comprehensive suite of tools that allows organizations to build scaleable websites, host core systems, and manage donor outreach and fundraising.

It’s little wonder, either—Amazon’s powerful, secure cloud services saves organizations thousands of dollars on the physical infrastructure necessary for computing power, database storage, content delivery, and other key functions.

Amazon Web Services has two free tiers—a 12-month plan and an always-free plan—that may prove sufficient for smaller organizations. They also offer "NPO Office Hours" on the 3rd Wednesday of every month at 2:00pm Eastern to answer questions and offer ideas.

Nonprofit Discount Pricing: $2,000 in AWS credits for eligible organizations.
Check out all the Amazon Web Service integrations on Zapier.

Increase Conversion Rate with Visual Website Optimizer

50% off any VWO plan

If you want to increase your conversion rate (volunteer applications, donations, newsletter subscriptions), regular A/B testing and optimization is a must. Unfortunately, it’s also expensive. Hiring an expert, even a consultant, is beyond the budget of most nonprofits.

Visual Website Optimizer is doing things a little differently. Their conversion optimization platform makes it easy and intuitive to A/B test and optimize your web pages—with minimal IT help. Rich features like comprehensive analytics, clickmaps, and heatmaps give you deep user experience information, while the visual editor lets you tweak and test site optimizations with very little tech know-how.

With their intuitive tools and 50% discount, Visual Website Optimizer is lowering the bar to create attractive, optimized websites for nonprofits.

Run Your Business with Zoho

Special pricing for nonprofits

The Zoho app family features dozens of apps ranging from sales and marketing tools to finance tools to helpdesk software to recruiting tools. Their goal is to bring together a wide range of apps in order to simplify the process of doing business while dramatically reducing the cost.

Many of Zoho’s products have great free plans, but they also offer special pricing to nonprofits (although their site does not list specific discount rates for every app.)

Check out our Zoho integrations:

Disappointed that your favorite app wasn’t listed? While many apps don’t offer nonprofit discounts, you may be able to find the software discounts you want at TechSoup, a global network dedicated to helping nonprofits make a bigger impact through technology. Companies like Adobe, Intuit, and Microsoft donate software licenses to TechSoup, which are then made available to member organizations.

Want to learn how you can use all these great apps to save time and money? Read these Zapier strategies for nonprofits and learn 14 ways to do more on a limited budget.

Photo Funnels: How a Professional Organizer Manages All Her Photographs

caroline@theswedishorganizer.com (Caroline Guntur) — Tue, 02 May 2017 06:00:00 -0000

If I asked you where your digital photos are, what would you say?

My guess is that you would probably name your smartphone and maybe even throw in a cloud account or two. Perhaps you’d also mention your computer and then remember that you have an active Facebook feed and an Instagram account that you post to occasionally. Then you’d say that there might be some photos on a tablet at home or an old PC you forgot to transfer photos off of when you upgraded to a new laptop. Then, just as you think you’ve named all possible places, it dawns on you that you have a few flash drives and photo CDs in a box somewhere.

Sound familiar?

As a Certified Photo Organizer, I can tell you that this is not an uncommon scenario. The modern photo collection is scattered across countless devices, social media sites, and cloud storage accounts. Who knows what’s where anymore? This is becoming a real head scratcher and source of anxiety for a lot of people, many of whom suffer from digital photo overwhelm.

The good news is you can redefine your photo workflow so that all of your photos are organized—automatically and with little effort on your part—so that your precious memories are all in one place, easily retrievable, backed up instantly, and always there for posterity.

Digital Photo Overwhelm Is a Very Real Problem

When photo app Mylio announced their world digital photo forecast last year, it showed that 1.7 trillion photos would be taken in 2017, a staggering 9% growth over the previous year. This trend shows no signs of slowing down and yet, somehow, we look at our photos less and less.

Why? We can’t find them.

Every year, millions of photos are at risk of getting getting lost, deleted, or forgotten because they’re not backed up. That’s a problem. The reality is that we can’t back up our photos if we don’t have them organized in a specific place. If we fix that, backups are all of a sudden more likely to happen.

Sure, it takes time to set up, but if you think about it, what matters more than your memories? You probably wouldn't blink an eye if you lost an ATM receipt or accidentally deleted an email newsletter or office memo. But if you lost irreplaceable photos of your child growing up or the only photos of someone you love before they passed away? That's the heartbreaking part—and why a photo workflow to preserve these memories is so important.

Redefine Your Photo Workflow

Organizing your photos is a constant battle with time. It involves ongoing maintenance to stay on top of all the memory streams that flow towards you. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to manage this constant influx of photos, so that you don’t have to spend hours and hours downloading every single photo from every single place.

I would like to introduce you to a surefire way of minimizing the time you spend shuttling images from one place to another: photo funnels.

In this post, I’ll show you how to:

Define a digital photo hub
Rethink your photo management workflow
Automate your photo streams, a.k.a. your “photo funnels”

Establishing automatic photo funnels will help you consolidate your photos into one place, so that you can focus more on what’s important—keeping those memories safe.
As it turns out, you don’t have to be a photographer to have an impeccable photo workflow!

Your Digital Photo Hub (DPH)

Good organizing teaches us to keep “like with like” and to create safe “homes” for our things, so that we always know where they go. Photo organizing is no different. When you have photos scattered in multiple places, you can easily lose track of where they are or, worse, you might lose them. To combat this problem, you need to establish a “home” for your photos to live. This is what’s referred to as your DPH (digital photo hub).

Your digital photo hub is the one place where all of your memories can live safely. This is base camp for your workflow. Every photo you have, no matter where it originates, should pass through your DPH at some point. It’s the place you go to look for a photo to print or share, and it’s the place you back up regularly. If there is one thing you can do to help ensure that your photos stay protected, it getting all of them into one place. Consistency is key.

Defining Your Digital Photo Hub (DPH)

Over the last few years, I have troubleshooted many clients' digital dilemmas and I have come to the conclusion that, ideally, your DPH should be a folder on your main computer or a dedicated external hard drive. I have also developed a set of criteria that guides me in choosing the best solution for each client. Let this same set of criteria guide you.

When choosing a digital photo hub, the ideal solution should be:

1. Dedicated
Your digital photo hub should be dedicated to memories only. This can include photos, home movies, letters, and other memorabilia, but don’t mix in your work documents or your music library. Disorganization often starts with clutter, which is a direct result of bending the “like with like” rule, so I like to stay strict on this. When you have a digital photo hub that’s dedicated, there’s no question about where to look for your photos. Keeping it labeled adds another layer of protection.

2. Intentional
The digital photo hub should be a place that you selected specifically for your memories, not a place that “just happened” to be available. Have you ever thought about why you are storing files in certain spots? It is just because it’s the most convenient option, or is it because you don’t know where else to put them? Did you actually select this place with your photos in mind?
So often I find that clients store files in “temporary” places because they haven’t figured out the one place that makes the most sense to them. You want to put some thought into this, and invest in something reliable, so do a little research and find the best match for your needs.

3. Accessible at all times
You shouldn’t have to pay to access your own photos. Your original photo library should be available when you need it and where you need it. This is why I never recommend that cloud storage is your digital photo hub: If you can't access the internet, you can't get to your photos. Cloud storage is a wonderful backup solution, but it’s not the ideal place to keep your originals. Your DPH should be a local solution.

4. High capacity
Your digital photo hub should be high capacity because it has to fit everything in one place. That’s the whole idea behind it. It should have plenty of room for your current photo collection as well as any printed photos that you have yet to scan. You also want to take into account the memories that will come into your life within the foreseeable future.

The size of your digital photo hub will depend on many different variables, especially your file formats, but a good rule of thumb is to look up the current size of your collection and double that number. We take so many photos and videos nowadays that a high-capacity hub is a must. Digital storage is affordable, so there’s no reason to skimp on it.

5. Durable
All technology has a limited lifespan, there’s no way around that, but you can rest easier knowing that you have picked a somewhat durable digital photo hub. If it’s your computer, does it need to be upgraded? If it’s an external hard drive, how old is it?

If you are planning on purchasing an external hard drive to use, I would recommend one that is waterproof, shockproof, and scratch-proof. If it’s fire-proof, even better. It should be able to withstand smaller household accidents, including kids or pets getting hold of it. No matter what you choose, make sure it’ll last for a while.

A good rule of thumb for external hard drives is to look for drives with longer warranties (3+ years)—the longer the better. (Backblaze offers a hard drive reliability study in case you're curious about specific drives to use for your photo storage.) And remember that all drives fail—it's not a matter of if, but when. Build in redundancy to your backup plan for the inevitable crash.

6. Predictable
Technology is sometimes unpredictable, but when it comes to your digital photo hub, look for the most predictable place you can find. I get asked all the time why cloud storage isn’t the optimum place to keep a photo collection. Why is this not the ideal DPH? After all, it syncs to most (if not all) devices, and it’s extremely convenient.

I agree that on the surface cloud storage certainly looks to be the best option, but even if you get over the potential accessibility issue, predictability is where it falls apart. What if the service goes out of business? What if the terms of service agreement changes? What if they don’t let you download more than one photo at a time? What if someone deletes a shared folder from the account? The list goes on. When you designate a local DPH, you cut the unpredictability factor in half. Cloud storage is great, but it’s best used as a backup, not for storing your precious originals.

Given the criteria above, the best Digital Photo Hub for most people would likely be a folder on a local or external hard drive that is backed up regularly to other drives and destinations, including off-site in the cloud. Your "Photos" folder on your computer, external hard drive, or network attached storage device is one that you can depend on for finding any photo you've ever captured.

Action steps:

Tally the storage space needed for all of your photos scattered across your computer, tablet, phone, social media, etc.
Then double that storage space estimate and either dedicate or reallocate space on your hard drive or purchase a new drive to be your digital photo hub.

Figuring Out Your Photo Workflow

Once you have a safe and secure digital photo hub ready, start documenting where your photos are coming from, so that you can funnel them into their new home with as little effort as possible. You also have to figure out where they are going after the fact. What are you doing with these photos? Sharing them with family members? Uploading them someplace to create photo books?

I like to use a workflow template with my clients to help them visualize how their photos move from one stage to another. Your workflow will vary depending on what devices you have and what services you use, but the overall idea is the same. When you have clearly defined inputs and outputs, you can begin looking at how to improve and automate the process.

Example of a fill-in-the-blank workflow template I use with clients

Defining Your Inputs

The first thing to look at is your “inputs.” On a monthly basis, where do your photos come from?

A vast majority of people will name their smartphone as the main source, but you might have a different place. Remember regular cameras? They still exist. You might also have photos coming from social media or email accounts. I know that my overseas family members email me photos all the time, and they also post photos that I would like to have in my own collection to Facebook. You probably have a similar scenario in your life, so the question becomes: how do these photos get to your DPH with as little work as possible?

Action step:

List the sources from which your photos most often originate.

Defining Your Outputs

Before you start making decisions on how to simplify your importing, also look at your outputs. If you think about your exporting process, where do your photos end up?

Think about what you do with your photos once you have them in your collection. Do you share them with others? If so, whom do you share them with, how, and when? Do you create photo books? Do you upload them somewhere to order prints? Identify your outputs the same way you identified your inputs—by analyzing where they go once you have taken them.

How can you get them to go where they need to go in as few steps as possible?

If you can’t answer this question, that’s OK. It’s very common to not have any outputs. The simple reason is the problem I’m addressing in this post—the fact that many photos are so scattered that it’s simply to hard to do anything with them. There are too many of them, everywhere, and it becomes overwhelming.

Photos are meant to be enjoyed, so if you don’t have any outputs, consider it a problem. However, that part of the equation can be fixed once your photos are organized on your digital photo hub. When you know where you photos are, it’s much easier to share and enjoy them.

Action step:

List the sites or social networks where you most often share your photos.

Set Up an Automatic Workflow

When you understand exactly where your photos are coming from and where they’re going, you can simplify the whole process by setting up some automation rules. I like to use Zapier for this because of the extensive list of services that integrates with it.

What’s the Common Denominator?

Let’s say that you have figured out that your main sources of photos are:

Smartphone
Facebook
Instagram
Gmail

How would you automate a workflow to help you funnel these photos?

The key is to find the lowest common denominator. In other words, you need to figure out the shortest (and least complicated) route for your photos to travel. This is all about minimizing the time you spend looking for your photos in various places, and, more importantly, it’s meant to take some of that manual work off your busy schedule.

On occasion, especially if the DPH you have selected is a folder on your computer, there may not be a direct way for you to get the photos there. You may have to corral them into a cloud storage account (such as Dropbox) first, which in this case is a good idea. That gets them into one place automatically, and you can then download and import them manually to your DPH from there.

Move Photos from Your Smartphone to Your DPH

If your digital photo hub is on your computer, the quickest way from A to B is to import your photos directly. You can do this by connecting your phone to your computer wirelessly, with a USB cord, or by using a cloud storage app's importing program — Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive all offer options to automatically copy photos from your connected phone to these online storage spaces. As an example, I have my camera roll set to automatically upload to my Forever account, which is a service I use frequently and highly recommend.

Action steps:

Find out if your preferred cloud storage solution offers an app (most of them do).
Look in the settings for an “auto-sync over Wi-Fi” option, and give the app permission to access your camera roll.
Open the app to sync your photos. The auto-sync feature will automatically copy them to your cloud storage account.

Get Photos from Your Apps to Your Camera Roll

If you have photos coming in from apps like Snapchat or Whatsapp, you can go into these apps' settings and choose to have those photos automatically saved to your camera roll as well. Once those photos are in your camera roll, they move alongside the “regular” photos that were taken with your phone. Whatsapp is a big source of family photos for me (third in terms of photo volume), so I make sure it saves everything to my camera roll.

Transfer Photos from Facebook to Dropbox

Facebook is another big source of photos for me, second only to my iPhone in terms of volume, so it’s crucial for me to have an automation rule to save some time.

In my case, I’m a member of a few family history groups, which includes distant family members who post photos of common ancestors. These are often photos I would like to save on my DPH. Are they the best quality available? No, perhaps not, but I’d rather have them saved than not. If there is a photo I absolutely fall in love with, I request a better resolution version, but short of emailing my distant cousins, this is a quick way to get the job done. Sometimes, “good enough” is perfect.

I use a Zapier workflow that automatically copies photos from a Facebook Group to a folder in Dropbox. To set this up yourself, log into or sign up for your Zapier account and then follow these steps for making a Zap:

Step 1. Choose "Facebook Groups" as the trigger app.

Step 2. In the next screen, click "show less common options" and then select "New Photo" as the trigger.

Step 3. Connect your Facebook Groups account.

Step 4. Select the Facebook Group you want to watch for new photos. Note that you need to be an admin of the group to select it.

Step 5. Follow the prompts to test the trigger step. You should have at least one recent photo added to the Facebook Group for this to work.

Step 6. Next, select Dropbox as the action app.

Step 7. Choose Upload file for the action.

Step 8. Connect your Dropbox account.

Step 9. Set up the template by choosing the folder you want to save the photos to (note that this folder should already exist in Dropbox). For the file, click on the plus (+) sign at the right of the field and select Picture from Step 1:

Leave the other default settings.

Step 10. After clicking continue and testing this step, you can save and name your Zap.

That's it. From now on, new photos pasted to your group will be saved automatically to your Dropbox folder. You could also do this with Google Drive instead, if that's your preferred cloud storage service.

Transfer Photos from Instagram to Dropbox

If you’re a heavy Instagram user, you can create a Zap to funnel all of your new Instagram photos to your Dropbox account, so you never have to first download the photo from Instagram itself and then re-upload. Similarly to Facebook, Instagram can easily be connected to Dropbox to save all of your photos in one place as they post. For even better results, create a search string condition to look for specific hashtags.

Gmail Attachments to Dropbox

If you get a lot of photos from friends and family members via email, you can automatically save those photos to Dropbox instead of downloading and moving each photo individually.

If you use Gmail, one way to do this is to set up a Zap that funnels all of your attachments into a specific folder in Dropbox. You can set the Zap search string to specifically look for file extensions (like JPEGs) or labels such as “family photos.” That way, as soon as something arrives in your inbox, it gets uploaded to your Dropbox account automatically.

The Software Alternative

If your computer is your Digital Photo Hub and you would prefer to have a direct way to funnel all of your photos to the same place, an alternative is to find a photo organizing program with syncing capabilities. This may not solve all of your photo consolidating needs, but it can certainly simplify and streamline many of them.

There are many options on the market, but I can highly recommend Mylio, which is a program you can use to sync photos to and from multiple devices, including your phone. Mylio gives you the option of bringing in your own cloud and importing photos from your Facebook account. It’s my go-to solution for clients who need a cross-platform solution that is highly customizable, and it’s the only photo organizing software I know of that allows you import your high-resolution photos from your phone while at the same time syncing low-resolution versions back out. This means that you can carry your entire photo library with you and only use up a fraction of the storage space it would otherwise occupy, making it an ideal solution for those on the go.

Can You Consolidate Your Photo Streams?

As you can see, figuring out your photo funnels isn’t the easiest thing to do, but once you do it, it saves you a lot of time. Using automation rules won’t eliminate the need for editing and organizing, but it will help you gather everything in one place, which is a big source of frustration for many photo enthusiasts.

It’s also important to note that your workflow may change over time as you introduce new devices or change accounts, but it’s always a good idea to have your photo funnels in the back of your mind because they allow you to efficiently import your photos to your digital photo hub on a regular basis.

No matter what your photo workflow looks like or where your memories are coming from, set aside some time in your calendar to get your photos into your digital photo hub. And while you’re at it, ask yourself: Can I consolidate my photo streams better?

Title photo by picjumbo.com via Pexels.

The 6 Best Business Email Hosting Services for Team Email, Contacts, and Calendars

matthew.guay@zapier.com (Matthew Guay) — Mon, 01 May 2017 08:00:00 -0000

Email's so ubiquitous today, we simply take it for granted, seemingly another natural resource alongside air and water. Just like you have a personal ID number, phone number, and postal code, you have an email address—it's your digital passport, the tool that unlocks all your other tools.

For your personal email address, there's not all that much to consider. You likely get an email address with your internet or cell provider or have a Gmail or Hotmail account you signed up for years ago. Either way, you can send and receive emails from anyone on earth with an email address. That's the magic of email: It just works, and you don't have to think much about it.

For your company's email, though, email's at the center of everything you do. Your email service isn't just for messaging; it also manages your calendar, contacts, files, and more. It likely also manages your company's data on employee's mobile devices.

That's why the tool that powers your team's email is such an important choice. Here's what each of the most popular hosted business email providers does best—and your alternatives for hosting your own email server.

A Brief History of Business Email

The original Lotus Notes, one of the first professional email apps (screenshot via IBM)

Step back a few decades, and the typical desk would be covered in paper versions of the things that come in our email apps today. There would be a stack of letters, a paper calendar with appointments and tasks, a Rolodex with addresses, and a notebook with important info. When every desk got a computer, apps ate those one after another.

Email came first. As early as 1962, electronic messages were sent inside the US Department of Defense AUTODIN network—the first email. Email grew inside isolated university and corporate networks, then in 1971 the first email was sent between networks by Ray Tomlinso as ARPANET began connecting disparate government and university networks into the earliest version of the internet. It used the first email addresses, with the recipient's account name followed by an @ symbol and the host computer's name, aka ray@bbna.

What started out as an experiment became the primary way we communicate online. The original email app, mail, shipped with the first version of UNIX in 1972—one that's still included in Linux and macOS today.

With email came contacts and calendars—albeit a bit later. The original email software was text-based, designed for sending quick notes and little more. Then came professional email software that looks more like today's apps, with a list of messages and a pane to read formatted messages, came soon after. And they gained features. Lotus Notes, for instance, was released in 1989 as one of the original PIM—or personal information management—apps. It synced your email messages along with your address book and notes in a communications tool referred to as groupware which set the standard for how email would work at work. Lotus Notes used one server to store your company's data, with client apps on each user's personal computer that your data with that of your team.

Exchange 5 included a Web Access app to view email in a browser (via Techgenix)

By 1997, another app joined the email suite: Calendars. Microsoft's Exchange Server was first released a year earlier, with Microsoft Outlook following close behind as a tool to manage all of your personal information including your appointments.

Exchange brought another thing to the now-standard email suite: Webmail. With its Exchange Web Access—later rebranded Outlook Web Access—you could check email online from any browser. That, along with push email—from both BlackBerry and Exchange server in 2003—made email something that went with you everywhere, not just something that stayed on your desk.

An early version of Google Docs (via Google)

Email apps kept getting better. Gmail's launch in 2004 brought business-style features and seemingly limitless storage to consumer email—then in 2006, Google brought Gmail to companies with Google Apps for Your Domain, later rebranded to G Suite. That changed the equation. Instead of your company running an email server like Exchange and buying an email app for your personal computer, they could let Google take care of everything, with Gmail's servers handling your email, pushing it to your phone, and letting you read it online.

The next year brought the last major app set to the email collaboration suite: Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Microsoft had long bundled its Outlook email app with other Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Google took the next step and brought them to the web, as Exchange had done to email a decade earlier. You could now manage your company files and edit documents right alongside your email, calendar, contacts, and more.

Email. Contacts. Calendars. Those three still form the core email suite trio—they're the three apps you should expect to get with any new email account, the minimum you should want for your team.

Notes and to-dos are a close second. The former have come with email services since Lotus Notes, even if those notes are sometimes saved as draft emails and aren't as flexible as Evernote or other notes apps. To-dos in email suites sometimes come disguised as part of your calendar, and aren't as full-featured as project management apps—but they're still a handy way to make sure you remember things that need to be done.

Office apps and files round out the most feature-packed email suites. They're something you should watch for if you want one suite that will do everything your team needs. Those same suites will also often include mobile device management, for everything your IT team needs in one package.

And then there are extras: Chat, websites, video conferencing. They're nice to have if they come with your suite—but not as crucial as email, contacts, and calendars.

The big names in the email industry are still around. You can still license Lotus Notes from IBM, Exchange Server from Microsoft, or BlackBerry Enterprise Server from RIM—and they can still be a cost effective solution for corporations. For most businesses, though, the best option is a hosted email service, something like G Suite or the new Office 365 that can handle your team's email and more without ever needing to install software or manage a server.

Here are the best options—with a screenshot of the service's email app and their monthly pricing:

App	Best for:	Price
Office 365	Microsoft Office and Exchange Server features	$6/mo.
G Suite	Simple collaboration with Google Apps	$5/mo.
Zoho Workplace	An incredible variety of team apps for free	Free; $3/mo.
Rackspace Email	Simple hosted email or a private Exchange server	$2/mo.
FastMail	Fast email with programmable filters	$5/mo.
Kerio Cloud	Full-featured email with VoIP for your office phone	$4/mo.

Office 365 Business

For Microsoft Office and Exchange Server features

Exchange has come a long way. From an internal tool built to handle Microsoft's own email to software you'd install on your server, Exchange over the years has added new features and expanded what we expect from an email service. And with Office 365, you can now get those features along with Office apps in the cloud, whether you use Microsoft servers or not.

Microsoft offered a hosted version of Exchange for a few years before turning their entire Office suite into a subscription service in early 2011. Today's Office 365 offers the same features as Exchange 2016 with push email, an online version of Outlook, and Active Directory user management to provision company devices and remotely manage your team's data. And it's packed with extra features, including the new Microsoft Teams chat tool, a Sharepoint-based intranet, a business version of OneDrive for file sharing, and Skype for Business for your phone calls and video chats.

Perhaps its best feature is that all Office 365 come bundled with Office Online, with slimmed-down versions of Word, Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint that run in your browser so you can collaboratively edit documents with your team. With a Business Premium or Enterprise E3 subscription, you can also get the desktop and mobile versions of Microsoft Office, for the full software suite along with your email subscription. It's an easy way to get most of the software your team needs in one suite that you can manage together.

Office 365 Tools Included: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, Documents, Files, Video and Text Chat, Intranet

Office 365 Business Price: $6/month per user Business Essentials plan for email, 1TB file storage, and Office Online for up to 300 users; $15/month Business Premium plan for Essentials plus desktop and mobile Office apps; $8 or $20/month for Enterprise E1 or E3 plans for email only or email plus Office apps, respectively, for unlimited users

For a deeper look at Office 365's features and pricing plans, check out our Office 365 review.

See Office 365 integrations on Zapier, including individual integrations for Excel and OneNote

G Suite

Best for simple collaboration with Google Apps

The original online email suite, G Suite—the recently rebranded Google Apps for Work—gives you Gmail, Google Docs, and your other favorite Google apps on your company's domain. Originally just a custom branded version of Gmail, G Suite has gained new apps and features as they've been added to Google's consumer-focused apps.

You'll get the same Gmail experience with labels, filters, and a wide range of add-ons, along with the newer Google Inbox for a quick way to sort through your mail like a to-do list. You'll be able to easily share documents and spreadsheets with your team via Google Docs and can share entire folders with your full company with the new Team Drive. There are Hangouts for video chat, Forms to gather data, and Sites to help you quickly build a website or intranet.

Google's administration tools are simple to use as well, and increasingly have the advanced features businesses need such as Google Vault for compliance archival. And since it's still the Gmail your team already knows how to use, there will be little learning curve getting your team on board.

G Suite Tools Included: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Documents, Files, Forms, Video and Text Chat, Intranet

G Suite Price: $5/month per user Basic plan for core Google apps and 30GB storage; $10/month per user Business plan for unlimited storage, Vault, and audit reports

For a deeper look at G Suite features and pricing plans, check out our Gmail review.

See G Suite integrations on Zapier, with individual integrations for Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Drive

Zoho Workplace

Best for an incredible variety of team apps for free

Zoho offers apps for just about everything: Accounting, marketing, HR, inventory, app building, and more. Those tools you'd use as a team, managing all of your company's data in one place. Then, for personal email and more, the Zoho Workspace suite gives you Zoho's take on email, calendar, contacts, documents, and much more.

Zoho Mail is a modern take on email with social networking style features. Instead of sending a long message with a subject and signature every time, you can send a quick stream message to colleagues to get in touch or share an email from a client that you need to collaborate on. It includes shared email inboxes as well, so everyone on your marketing team can share the same partner and press emails, searching through them all along with their personal emails. And, it's a tabbed app, so you can switch between your inbox, calendar, and a draft email in a tap.

Combine that with the other Zoho apps that let you edit documents and spreadsheets online, chat with your team, and share ideas in an intranet or wiki, and it's a set of tools that can handle almost everything your company is working on. If you're already using some Zoho tools, having your team email in Zoho Workplace might be just the thing to tie it all together.

Zoho Tools Included: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Documents, Files, Video and Text Chat, Intranet

Zoho Workplace Price: Free for 25 users, 5GB storage, and a single domain; from $3/month per user Standard plan for core features, multiple domain hosting, and 30GB storage

For a deeper look at Zoho Workplace's features and pricing plans, check out our Zoho Mail review.

See Zoho Workplace integrations on Zapier, with individual integrations for Zoho Mail and other Zoho apps

Rackspace Email

Best for simple hosted email or a private Exchange server

You might not need every app for your team—the email basics might be enough. If so, Rackspace Email has two great options: Business Email or Hosted Exchange. Their core email offering is the basics you need to sync your team's email, calendars, and contacts—with a notes and to-do list app included. There's a basic web app to access everything, or you can sync with Outlook and other standard email apps.

For more advanced email features including push email, shared calendars and contacts, and archival tools, Rackspace also offers a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. It's a cost-effective way to get the same features as running Exchange on your own servers—without having to maintain or install anything. You can even use both together, opting for the cheaper Email accounts for some team members and paying extra for Exchange only for those who need its extra features.

Rackspace Email Tools Included: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes

Rackspace Email Price: $2/month per user Rackspace Email for core email feature and 25GB storage; from $7.99/month per user Hosted Exchange for Exchange features, shared calendars and contacts, and 100GB storage

Integrate Rackspace Email with Zapier using IMAP triggers and SMTP actions to watch for new messages and send emails automatically

FastMail

Best for fast email with programmable filters

For a tool focused just on the email essentials of messages, contacts, and calendar events, FastMail is a great tool for individuals and businesses alike. It's powerful and fast, with web and mobile apps that make it easy to figure out who said what in an email conversation. You can add multiple domains and sub-domains to your account to give each team member an email address that matches their department if you'd like. And, to sort through your emails, you can add quick filters or program advanced filters to organize your personal messages or store archives for compliance.

It's focused on the core email experience, but also includes the business-focused team features you'd expect. You can share calendars and contacts across your entire company, add custom branding to the app and login screen, and add a company footer to everyone's emails. It even includes some bonus features, letting you store files alongside your email attachments and access them via FTP. You can publish those with a simple personal website, hosted in your FastMail storage, as well.

FastMail Tools Included: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Files, Website

FastMail Price: $5/month per user Standard plan for custom domain, 25GB storage, and push mail, calendar, and contacts; $9/month per user Professional plan for 100GB storage and data retention policies

Integrate FastMail with Zapier using IMAP triggers and SMTP actions to watch for new messages and send emails automatically

Kerio Cloud

Best for full-featured email with VoIP for your office phone

Want a bit more than just email? Kerio Cloud offers a cloud and self-hosted alternative to Exchange with email, calendar, contacts, and chat. Kerio's web apps let you quickly access your data online, or you can sync it to any of your devices with Exchange-compatible push email. For chat, you can talk to anyone on your team with Apple Messages, Pidgin, or any other standard XMPP instant messaging apps.

You can also manage your company's phone calls via Kerio with Kerio Cloud Voice. That lets you automatically route calls to the correct person on your team, with a software phone that they can use to answer calls from anywhere. It's a way to bring your traditional phone calls into your email suite and make it just as easy to manage.

Kerio Tools Included: Email, Calendar, Contacts, Chat, VoIP (additional fee)

Kerio Cloud Price: $4/month per user Business plan for core features with 10GB storage and Exchange-compatible mobile sync; $9/month per user Business Pro plan for unlimited storage and advanced filtering

Integrate Kerio Cloud with Zapier using the IMAP triggers and SMTP actions to watch for new messages and send emails automatically

Host Your Own Email Server

Zimbra Collaboration is one of the more popular alternates to Microsoft Exchange (via Zimbra)

From the earliest days of email, if you wanted email, you had to host an email server. Until the mid-2000's, that was still nearly the only way to get email on your company's own domain.

Even today, there is still a wide range of great tools to host your own email, many of which are free. That's one of the best things about email: It's a service you can run on your own that works with every other email service automatically. Whether you're using G Suite, have Microsoft Exchange in a private VPS, or run your Postfix on your own server, you can email anyone else and know they'll receive your message, regardless of what email service they're using.

"Email is one of the bastions of the decentralized Internet," says Hacker News contributor Nux, "and we should hang on to it."

Imagine running a private social network on your own server that still lets your Twitter and Facebook friends see what you post. It's fanciful at best—but that's exactly what email offers.

But it's not so easy. As Digital Ocean software engineer Mitchell Anicas cautions, "setting up and maintaining your own mail server is complicated and time-consuming [and] most people will get more value, in the form of saved time, out of using a paid mail service."

Linux and macOS come with Postfix, the core terminal tools you need to run an email server. Windows Server includes a built-in SMTP server for a basic email experience. Both are a Mail Transfer Agent that can send and receive emails for you—and you could set them up for basic email features.

Want webmail and more advanced features that an email service would offer? macOS Server, a $19.99 add-on for macOS, includes an easy-to-configure email, calendar, and contacts sync server to use with native email apps. Open source tools like Roundcube or the self-hosted edition of Zimbra add webmail and management tools to your basic email—and pre-made VPS tools like Mail-in-a-Box let you set them up on a hosting service like Digital Ocean a few clicks. And for the most features, you could license Microsoft Exchange from $708 per server for email and Office Online apps from your own server—or you could even still use IBM Lotus Domino from $117/user/year if you'd like.

You'll get the most customized email experience, with your own datacenter's security—at the expense of software licenses and maintenance time. For most small businesses, hosted email makes the most sense, while self-hosted email might make the most sense in companies with in-house servers and a dedicated IT team.

Bonus: Get a Free G Suite eBook from Zapier

Setting up a hosted email service is far simpler than self-hosting your company's email—but it can still be tricky to do the first time. We've got the guide for you.

In 55 minutes, The Ultimate Guide to G Suite will teach you everything you need to know to set up, administer, and collaborate in a G Suite account for your team. You'll learn how to share everything from calendars to document templates with your entire team, find out how to make an intranet in Google Sites, and more.

It's the handbook you need to manage your company's email.

Email's not quite the simple, free service you're used to when managing an entire team's email. Just like sending an email newsletter or bulk drip emails, once you're managing enough inboxes, email needs a bit more thought and care.

But it can still be a set-it-and-forget-it service. With today's cloud email services, you'll just need perhaps a few hours to add your domain to your email service, set up new accounts for your team, and import their old data. Your service will take care of the rest, making sure your team has their emails, contacts, calendar appointments, files, Office documents, and more whenever they need them.

Ready to set up hosted email for your team? Here's our guide to set up G Suite for your domain, and how to import your team's old data to the new G Suite account. The steps will be a bit different if you use Office 365, Zoho, Rackspace, or another service, but the basics are the same—and in a few hours, your team will have a shiny new inbox with all the tools they need.

Lotus Notes screenshot via IBM; Outlook Web Access screenshot via Techgenix; Google Docs beta screenshot via the Google blog; Zimbra Collaboration screenshot via the Zimbra blog.

Welcoming Marketers Emily Irish and Sean Kennedy

wade@zapier.com (Wade Foster) — Fri, 28 Apr 2017 06:00:00 -0000

A note from Wade Foster, Zapier CEO:

I'm excited to welcome two new teammates to the Zapier marketing team today: Emily Irish and Sean Kennedy. Emily and Sean are the type of teammates we love to work with because when they didn't get the first role they applied for at Zapier, they didn't let it get them down. Instead, they took up the mantle to freelance for us and impressed us every step of the way. When we had a new role for a staff writer and a product marketer open up, Emily and Sean were the first people we thought of for those respective roles, and we're excited to have them join our team.

Emily Irish, Content Marketer

Hey! I’m Emily Irish and I’ll tell you a secret - I’ve dreamed of writing this Zapier welcome post for over a year. I hail from the wonderful city of Raleigh, NC (and, ironically, do not have any actual Irish heritage).

As a longtime fan of Zapier’s blog, it’s my great pleasure to be joining the Editorial Team. I got my roots in remote work via freelance writing, and have had the chance to see a lot of good content and a lot of bad content. So it’s with great excitement that I join an amazing team with a clear (and, quite honestly, rare) commitment to truly providing value through their content.

I first discovered Zapier’s blog a couple years ago, when looking for some productivity advice for my serial-procrastinating self. I loved the content, so I decided to check out the tool. But after reading the (old) home page, I said to myself “whoa, too techie for me.” It wasn’t until I read a blog post by Buffer that featured real Zapier integrations in context that I finally understood just how easy and amazing this tool was.

One look at the Zap template and I was hooked. Whenever I had a specific problem with productivity, the Zapier blog was #1 stop for advice. I started tinkering with the tool, finding neat integrations, and building microsystems around those integrations. It wasn’t long before you’d hear me in every marketing meeting with my previous employer: “Hey, you know, we could save you x number of steps on that project if we set up an integration…”

So when [Zapier marketing team manager] Danny Schreiber asked me to interview for this position (after I’d first applied for a marketing position, then spent a few months writing freelance for Zapier), I leapt at the chance to join the team full-time.

Now, I fully embrace the writer stereotype as I work in my sweatpants, build relationships "over the Internet" (thank you, team Slack!), and drink copious amounts of tea.

When I’m not working on an article or devouring research on the psychology of productivity, you can usually find me writing fiction, reading novels, or playing some good ol’ fashioned Dungeons & Dragons with my husband.

I’m looking forward to writing more content that helps you become more productive and efficient, so if you have any suggestions (or just irritating productivity roadblocks you want help with), shoot me an email and let me know!

Sean Kennedy, Product Marketer

About Me

Hey everyone! I'm Sean.

I'm delighted to be joining Zapier's marketing team as our second Product Marketer. So a little about me. Well, I'm from beautiful Vancouver, BC and am the latest Canadian to join the team. However, I'm originally from the Okanagan Valley. Basically, the Canadian version of the Napa Valley for you wine lovers who are unfamiliar.

My background in digital marketing is pretty diverse and I'd consider myself a full-stack marketer with a strong focus in design and email marketing. This comes from years of working in web design agencies, startups, and as a freelance email geek.

Discovering Zapier

I've always been really interested in apps, tools, and productivity so Zapier was a natural fit to add into my daily life.

I can't exactly recall when I discovered Zapier but I think it was back in early 2015. Since then, the blog has become a great source of information for me and even led to me working as a freelancer and writing a few posts of my own!

I've always really enjoyed sharing knowledge and helping people improve their work and their lives. Even before finding Zapier, I was already testing, reviewing, and blogging about apps and tools that I thought other entrepreneurs and small business professionals would enjoy.

Getting into Zapier

For years, I'd been applying to Zapier whenever they had an opening in their marketing department. I even created a zap that would sent me a text message any time a new job was posted (yup, I'm a real go getter). After going through two interview processes that didn't lead to a job, I was finally contacted out of the blue about a role that they thought I should apply for. Long story short, I finally got to join the team! Aw yea! happy dance

My fiancé, Nicole, and I checking out the sights in Rome. We're very excited.

Working at Zapier

At Zapier, I'll be looking after and advocating for you guys — our fans and customers! Primarily, my job will be looking for ways to promote learning about Zapier and make it easier for you to get going and use the product. This includes making sure learning about any new features we launch are as intuitive and easy to learn as possible.

I'll also be working very closely with our email marketing to make sure any emails we send you are actually helpful and as far from annoying as possible.

In fact, if any of you have any comments about our product or how our emails are working for you, I'd love to hear about it! Good or bad, shoot me a message!

Offline Mode

When not busy working on Zapier, you'll either find me exploring the great outdoors, wandering around Vancouver in search of good food or wine (sometimes both!), hanging out with my soon-to-be-wife and two lovable fur balls, or working on one of my many side projects, including Really Good Emails.

If you do see me, don't be afraid to come say hi or tweet at me on Twitter. I'm always up for a good conversation about startups, apps, productivity, or your favorite funny cat video.

Zapier is hiring! Come join our growing, fully-remote team.

The 12 Best RSS Reader Apps to Follow Your Favorite Blogs, Sites, and Feeds

vicky.cassidy@zapier.com (Vicky Cassidy) — Wed, 26 Apr 2017 06:00:00 -0000

The internet is overloaded with content. Even if you only set out to read the most important articles and watch the top videos, you'll never get done.

Just staying up-to-date and informed is a challenge. You have news to read, blogs to check, and YouTube hits you've got to watch. But instead of opening each site a half-dozen times a day, you can use an RSS app to curate your content automatically.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's a file that most websites update with their newest blog posts, videos, deals and more, so you can "subscribe" to sites and have new content automatically pushed to you. Instead of checking the 40 websites you follow, you can just open an RSS reader app and see what's new on all of those sites together.

In the years since Google Reader died, a wide range of RSS feed reader apps have come and gone. Today, there are still a number of great RSS tools that are actively being improved, apps you can use to follow your favorite sites—from powerful crowd favorites like Feedly to simple Chrome extensions like Feeder. Whether you want a simple app for consuming news on the go, or a powerful tool that archives the best content from hundreds of sites, there's an app here for you.

The Best RSS Reader Apps

For over a decade, Google Reader was the gold standard for RSS apps. That is, until July 2013, when Google abruptly stopped supporting the tool to focus on other products. The internet let out a collective groan.

Suddenly RSS readers were popular again, with hundreds of apps competing for Google Reader's former users on sites like ReplaceReader. Today, many of these apps are polished, high-quality feed readers that are a great tool for following your favorite sites.

At their core, RSS reader apps let you subscribe to content from your favorite sites. Typically, they'll download images and text from articles so you can read them offline, and will list all of the stories in chronological order. Many RSS apps then include tools to discover sites based on your favorite topics and let you save favorite articles to reference later.

There's two main types of RSS readers: online RSS services, and native RSS apps. The former run automatically in the background, finding new articles as soon as they're published. You can read your articles online, or typically sync them with apps for your phone or computer—either made by the RSS service, or from third-party developers. Then, native RSS apps sync RSS feeds directly on your device and often work with popular RSS services.

There are apps for every reading style, budget, and platform—here are some of the best ones.

The Best Hosted RSS Services

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
Feedly	Building a personalized newsfeed	Free; $7/mo.	Web, iOS, Android
Panda	A custom reading layout	Free; $4.99/mo.	Web, iOS, Chrome
Feedbin	Advanced search	$3/mo.	Web
NewsBlur	Predictive article filtering	Free; $2/mo.	Web, iOS, Android
Feed Wrangler	Advanced feed organization	$1.60/mo.	Web, iOS
Inoreader	Long term content archiving	Free; $1.25+/mo.	Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone
Selfoss	Customizing your RSS reader	Free	Self-hosted

Feedly (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for: Building a personalized newsfeed

When Google announced that Google Reader was being discontinued, Feedly gained 3 million new users in less than a month. It's continued to be popular and is one of the first RSS reader apps you'll hear mentioned if you ask people how they follow sites today. It's not hard to see why—its clean and simple interface is a perfect solution for the casual reader who wants to see all of their websites in one place.

Feedly is designed to be a simple way to build your own newsfeed about your favorite topics. Just search for a favorite site's name to follow it, or look up a topic to follow related stories. Feedly also curates "starter kits" of content focused around a certain topic, which can be a great way to discover new websites. You can group your favorite sites and topics into "collections," add custom tags, and save articles to boards to read them later without needing another reading app. These and other features make it easy to curate the best articles in your personal newsfeed.

Feedly integrates with most social media apps, so sharing interesting things you find is simple. And, if you upgrade to the Pro version, you’ll get extra features like keyword-based search and automatic backups to Dropbox.

Feedly Price: Free; from $7/month Pro plan for unlimited feeds, search and filtering, third-party integrations, and more

For a deeper look at Feedly's features and pricing, check out our Feedly review.

See Feedly integrations on Zapier

Panda (Web, iOS, Chrome)

Best for: A custom reading layout

One of the more unique new RSS reader apps, Panda lets you read your RSS feeds the way you want to. It includes a standard three column layout with your feeds, articles, and a preview of the original story by default. Or, tap the layout switcher button, and you can add multiple columns to view all of your favorite sites' stories at once, remove columns to focus just on your articles, and more. You can even switch to the different layouts with keyboard shortcuts to jump from a dashboard with all of your feeds to a clean reading view.

You can bookmark articles to read later or switch to a night mode to make it easier on your eyes when reading in the dark. Install it in Chrome, and it'll replace your New Tab page for an easy way to keep up with the news throughout your day.

Panda Price: Free; $4.99/month for no ads, unlimited feeds, and integrations

Feedbin (Web)

Best for: Advanced search

Another very popular RSS app is Feedbin. Once you’ve subscribed to your favorite sites, you can use Feedbin’s tagging system to organize your content into categories. Reading content on Feedbin is a breeze—the interface is nicely designed and allows for distraction-free reading (think Pocket with built-in feeds). Feedbin integrates with many popular Read Later and social media apps, and also allows you to add custom sharing services if your favorite tool isn't supported.

Feedbin's killer feature is search. Not only can you search all your content by keyword, but you can also save search criteria. That way, you can set up a dynamic folder that gives you a quick overview of a specific topic. Feedbin even creates a saved search API, in case you want to do something more with the data than just view it in the reader.

Feedbin Price: $3/month

NewsBlur (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for: Predictive article filtering

Like the first two apps, NewsBlur lets you subscribe to different sites and organize your content into folders. Its reading modes, though, let you switch between a simplified article view or an original view that shows the source website right in your feed reader.

NewsBlur's most interesting feature is its sophisticated filtering, which can automatically highlight or hide stories based on certain criteria. If you spend some time "training" your filters, the system will learn your preferences and try to surface the stories that interest you most. That way, you can subscribe to as many sites as you want, and still only see the content you're interested in.

NewsBlur also lets you share your favorite stories, either on social networks or inside of NewsBlur. Within the app, you can add stories that you read and like to your personal "blurblog," or find people with similar interests and follow their blurblogs as well. Or, you can run it on your own server for free, if you'd like.

NewsBlur Price: Free for subscribing to 64 sites; $24/year Premium account for unlimited sites, saved searches, and more; free open-source to run on your own server

Feed Wrangler (Web, iOS)

Best for: Advanced feed organization

Feed Wrangler’s goal is to help you "wrangle" the news. It's a distraction-free reader—boasting perhaps the cleanest interface in this list—that makes managing feeds simple. You can follow your favorite sites, and even use its beta podcast stream to listen to podcasts.

Your website and podcast subscriptions are organized into "streams." Streams can be simple: you can create a stream and assign different subscriptions to it. Or, you can build advanced streams by applying topic-based search criteria to your feed. If you're overwhelmed by content, Feed Wrangler can clean things up and empty out your reading queue.

Because Feed Wrangler is focused on reading, it doesn’t have social media integrations. It does, however, let you move articles you don’t have time to read to Instapaper, Pocket, or Pinboard with a single click—perfect for saving the best for later. And with its companion iOS apps for feeds and podcasts, you can keep your important news with you everywhere.

Feed Wrangler Price: $19/year

Inoreader (Web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone)

Best for: Long-term content archiving

Not sure where to start with RSS feeds? Inoreader’s "Discovery Mode" can help you find and follow specific topics and trending items. To stay organized, you can group your feeds in folders and use tags to separate out individual articles as you read them. Similar to Feed Wrangler, you can write more advanced rules to automatically sort content, too.

Inoreader allows you to subscribe to Twitter and Google+ users or searches, giving you one app for all of your online reading needs. You can then share your favorite articles on social networks or broadcast them within Inoreader, which shares your favorite content with your followers.

While most RSS apps only cache content for the short-term, Inoreader doesn’t have limited time archives: Your content—even the stuff you’ve already read—is stored permanently.

Inoreader Price: Free with ads; from $14.99/year Starter Plan for ad-free reading with customizable dashboard

Selfoss (Self-hosted Web, 3rd party iOS, Android)

Best for: Customizing your RSS reader

Want to host an RSS reader app on your own server? Selfoss is one of the best options for that today (along with the aforementioned NewsBlur). It's an RSS reader that lets you follow sites and your favorite people on Twitter in one app. Like many of the other RSS apps so far, it simplifies the reading experience and has some basic features that help you organize your feeds.

Selfoss is open source, so you can download it for free, dig into its code, and customize things if you'd like. You can add additional data sources, build plugins to add extra features, and download pre-made extras from its community. And with a Fever API bridge, it can sync with apps that were designed to work with the now-unsupported Fever RSS reader. It'll take a bit more work to start using, but will let you make a feed reader that's tailored to your needs.

Selfoss Price: Free open-source

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
The Old Reader	Called "the ultimate social reader", The Old Reader lets you follow others and see their favorite sites and articles—much like Google Reader did. It even has a CLI app to read feeds from Terminal.	Free; $3/mo. Premium	Web
Bloglovin'	A social news reader mixed with an RSS app, Bloglovin' lets you browse popular articles by topic and follow your favorite sites via RSS. It includes a built-in blogging tool, so you can write a simple blog right from your blog reader.	Free	Web, iOS, Android
BazQux Reader	Read the latest articles from sites and the comments on those articles, along with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ updates in the same app.	$19/year	Web
Digg Reader	The original social news site, Digg's new Reader service is a full-featured RSS reader that lets you subscribe to your favorite sites right alongside the best content Digg's recommending today.	Free	Web, iOS
Netvibes	Follow your RSS feeds, keep track of the weather and stock prices, and much, much more in Netvibes' "Dashboard of Things" that puts everything in one at-a-glance place.	Free; $2+/mo. Premium	Web, iOS
FlowReader	Read your feeds along with your full Facebook and Twitter timelines in one app—then share updates about what you're reading to Buffer, Tumblr, and more.	Free	Web, iOS, Android
Feedreader	One of the original PC RSS readers, Feedreader now has a new online RSS reader app—along with tools to help you discover great RSS feeds. You could use it to browse today's top stories without even setting up an account.	Free	Web
FreshRSS	Have your own server? FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS reader that looks very similar to the original Google Reader. Browse feeds by date, and sync over 100k articles without trouble.	Free open-source	Self-hosted Web
Tiny Tiny RSS	Want to tweak your RSS reader? Tiny Tiny RSS is a self-hosted tool with plugins and themes so you can customize it like you want. It also supports podcast feeds, and lets you share your favorite articles inside Tiny Tiny RSS.	Free open source	Self-hosted Web, Android

The Best Native RSS Reader Apps

Many of the best hosted RSS services include apps for your phone, but if you want offline access to your feeds on a Mac or PC, you'll often need to look for another app. Native RSS reader apps are often more powerful and customizable. You can set them to sync as often as you'd like, tweak their interface, and get notified as soon as a new story comes in.

Here are a few of the most popular options (and if you don't find one you like, be sure to check your device's App Store for other options).

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
Feeder	Simple RSS feeds	Free; $2/mo.	Chrome, iOS, Android
Newsbar	A news ticker on the side of your screen	$4.99	Mac, iOS
ReadKit	Syncing multiple RSS and Reading Services	$4.99	Mac
Reeder	Streamlined reading on iOS and Mac	$9.99	Mac, iOS
RSSowl	Automated actions and organization	Free	Windows, Linux, Mac

Feeder (Chrome, iOS, Android)

Best for: Simple RSS feeds

Feeder is perhaps the simplest way to read RSS feeds—one that's especially popular with those who want to quickly read the headlines and get on with their day. It's built around a Chrome extension that shows a list of your RSS headlines in your browser. Tap an article to read it, or just quickly skim through the latest updates without reading everything.

You can take your RSS feeds on the go with its paid plan and mobile apps, where you'll get both the headlines and a simplified view of the full articles. It's a great way to stay informed of what's going on, and read more deeply from your phone.

Feeder Price: Free on Chrome; $2/month for mobile apps and sync

Newsbar (Mac, iOS)

Best for: A news ticker on the side of your screen

Ever wished you could get a news ticker on your computer like the ones on the bottom of TV news stations? Newsbar does the trick. Install it and add your favorite feeds, and Newsbar will show the latest headlines on the side of your Mac's desktop (or in a dedicated app on your iPhone).

As you're browsing the latest headlines, you can hover over an interesting article to see the entire post. Or, you can hide Newsbar and set up notifications for keywords, and Newsbar will let you know whenever an article comes in about your most important topics. It's a simpler way to follow RSS feeds, one that'll make sure you always know what's happening.

Newsbar Price: $4.99 for Mac; $3.99 for iOS

ReadKit (Mac)

Best for: Syncing multiple RSS and Reading Services

Want a powerful RSS reader that always has an article queued up for you? ReadKit is a popular Mac RSS reader app that can sync feeds on its own, but also integrates with the most popular RSS services and reading later tools. It can sync your Feedly, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler, or Feedbin feeds to your desktop, as well as the articles you've saved to Instapaper and Pocket.

ReadKit has sophisticated search and sort capabilities, allowing you to build custom rules to move articles into the right folders. You can also customize your reading experience with themes and typefaces, and store articles offline so you'll have something to read even when the internet is down.

ReadKit Price: $9.99; 14-day trial available

Reeder (iOS, Mac)

Best for: Streamlined reading on iOS and Mac

A similar app that runs on both iOS and Mac, Reeder lets you read articles from 10 RSS reader services including Feedbin, Feedly, NewsBlur, and more. It can also sync RSS feeds on its own, along with your Instapaper articles for offline reading. You can then share your content with over a dozen different services, to start a draft blog post from an article, save an article to Evernote, or share it on social networks.

You can customize Reeder to look the way you want, with detailed reading and theme options along with keyboard shortcuts to help you read faster on your Mac. It even includes gestures: Pull up on an article to go to the next one, pinch to parse the article text, and swipe up to share a piece.

Reeder Price: $9.99 for Mac; $4.99 for iOS

RSSOwl (Mac, Windows, Linux)

Best for: Automated actions and organization

For a more utilitarian approach, RSSOwl is another desktop RSS app that's extremely customizable. It syncs RSS feeds on its own, so you can keep a local database on your computer of your favorite articles.

Then, you can drill into them with its search capabilities. Within the search engine, you can use logic expressions to look at anything in an article. Searches can be saved to create dynamic feeds to find future articles, and you can even automate actions to send an alert if certain criteria are met using the "News Filter" feature. If you want to save an article, you can move it to the archive folder or use the "News Bin" feature to organize your saved content.

RSSOwl Price: Free, donation supported

App	Best for:	Price	Platform
NetNewsWire	After a long hiatus, the Mac companion to the original and now defunct PC RSS reader FeedDemon has returned with a brand new set of apps and its own sync service. You can open articles in multiple tabs, get started quickly with recommended sites, and sync feeds on your iPhone and Mac without paying for a hosted service.	$19.99 Mac; $7.99 iOS	Mac, iOS
gReader	For a simple way to get the news on Android, gReader is one of the most popular options. It can sync RSS feeds on its own or with Feedly and The Old Reader, caches your articles for offline reading, and even supports listening to podcast feeds. If you want, it can even read your RSS feeds out loud to you.	Free; $4.99	Android
Reeder	Another RSS reader app that syncs with nearly every popular service, Reeder was one of the original popular RSS apps for iOS. It's polished, and uses gestures to switch between services and reading modes.	$9.99 Mac; $4.99 iOS	Mac, iOS

Build an RSS Reader in Your Favorite App

It seems like there should be an RSS app for everyone. But if you're struggling to find the perfect tool, the best tool might just be one you're already using.

Like reading articles in Pocket? Feedhuddler can turn it into an RSS reader, automatically sending your new RSS articles into your Pocket queue. Or, Zapier's RSS integrations could save new RSS feed posts to Instapaper, Pocket, Evernote, or other reading apps:

Maybe you just need a notification about new posts. Or perhaps you need a more robust way to log every article published. Zapier's can help, sending you a push notification, email, or Slack message about new articles—or logging them to a Google Sheets spreadsheet for you.

Or maybe your favorite apps and sites don't include RSS feeds. Zapier can help turn almost any app's notifications into an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to them in one place.

Alternately, you can use Zapier to make your own filtered, combined RSS feed that will show all of the articles from your favorite sites, with filters to only show the articles you're interested in.

A custom RSS feed reader built in Google Sheets

You can even build a custom RSS feed reader inside Google Sheets, using its =importfeed() function. Here's how.

Be sure to experiment—with a few tricks, you can read RSS feeds in your favorite apps, anywhere.

RSS is one of the oldest parts of the internet, but even in today's social media-addicted world, it's still useful. It's one of the best ways to make sure you see everything your favorite sites publish, and never miss out on that amazing Craigslist deal.

If you're just getting started using RSS, try picking an app that's simple to use. Add its extension to your browser and subscribe to favorite sites, then you'll start looking out for RSS feeds everywhere. Power users—those still mourning Google Reader—should consider which features they need most and find an app that matches their need.

From unique organization tools to simple reading experiences, there's an RSS reader for everyone. We'd love to hear why you picked your RSS reader in the comments below!

Zapier senior writer Matthew Guay contributed to the updated version of this article.