11 Free Tools for the SMART Technical Writers

As a technical writer, you will be using some of the industry standards tools that your company has purchased with an enterprise license. You are able to execute your everyday job very well within the contours of these tools.

But, have you ever thought of making use of some auxiliary tools which could boost your productivity and quality at the same time?

For example, a tool to manage your to-do list for effective and smart time management.

These tools can save an ample amount of your drafting time. Just like you speak and the speech to text technology helps in drafting the content very fast.

What if these tools do not even cost you a penny?

Read this article in which I have compiled the list of tools for you. 

Some tools may be obvious to many of you but those are included thinking of the bigger picture of the audience.

 Let’s get more productive and efficient with the use of these tools.

1.      Speech to text

Speech recognition technology is fairly a new technology that helps you to literally speak with your device. It is a desktop application in windows.

This technology is used to give commands to the device to achieve the desired output. For example, you can give speech commands to your computer to open the browser or speak some lines to draft it in a word document.

With more and more time the speech to text also learns by itself and predicts what the user says with near to zero error.

It just makes the user smarter and helps to save a lot of time.

NOTE: If you are having a hard time with this inbuilt speech to text application in windows, go check out the speech to text feature in Google docs. It's more user friendly and supports multiple languages. 

 

2.      Snipping tool

Of course, you are aware of this tool. It is a free desktop tool that allows you to take screenshots on your computer screen and share or store it.

You can grab only the portion which you need, to save it as an image. If you do not choose to save, the image will stay in your clipboard and you can paste it in a proper place.

You can do basic annotations on the snip with a pen or eraser tools.

There is a delay mode which helps you to perform some quick action before you can take a grab. You can select the delay mode to maximum 5 seconds, it will make sure that you get a window of 5 seconds after you click to capture and before you are taking a snip.

For more information read 10 use snipping tool to capture screenshots

 

3.      Google docs

It is an authoring tool that is very similar to words. One of the best advantages of working with google doc is that it's cloud-based (you can store the source files as a shared content).

People with access or you can access the source files from any device. This makes it very convenient for collaborations. You can add add-ons for meeting different needs and be creative. 

You can also choose from the templates gallery to get a head start with formatting.

You can work offline also. The file gets saved in google drive.

There are many trending and less used/known features in google docs. Read 17 Less known Google Docs feature that you are not using

 

 

4.      Trello

Trello is a web-based application by Atlassian which helps to manage your to-do list in a very systematic approach. It helps to visualize your goals and create milestones and track them in the forms of cards.

You can create a checklist for each card. When your goal is complete you can move the card to the next level or next goal defined by you.

There is plug-in support for this tool which lets you seamlessly connect with other Google apps or a communicator or the desired application.

I personally used Trello for my blogging work. It helps to define my goal levels and manage all the workarounds very systematically.

Here is an online Business Planning Trello board

NOTE: The Atlassian products are one of the most trending software applications that are used in almost all the organizations. The product line of Atlassian includes the apps:

1. JIRA

2. Confluence

3. Trello

4. BitBucket etc

These products are absolutely free for personal use.

5.      Steps Recorder

Windows step recorder is a very cool feature that comes by default with the windows 7 or above. To use it, press the windows button and search for “Steps recorder”. 

Select “Start Record” and then the computer starts recording what action you do on the screen. 

The clicks you made after that gets recorded with a step and image. The output is in the form of an MHTML file format.

You can change the settings to choose a desired output file location and the maximum number of screengrabs to record.

 

6.      Quilbot

Quilbot is an artificial intelligence-based paraphrasing tool. It uses machine learning to reword, restructure text.

It is a very powerful tool that you can use to create fluency and produce some plagiarism free creative writings.

I have been personally using this tool for writing feature descriptions.

Click here to get started.

 

7.      Canva

Canva is a web-based tool for making graphics. You can design and create beautiful posters, presentations, flyers, letterheads, resume, book cover, and whatnot.

You will get to choose from a lot of free templates that you can make use of or else you can create something from scratch.

Graphics or images are very useful in documentation because a picture can say a thousand words. Using graphics in your work makes it very appealing visually. People also tend to remember things more if they see something in the image. Use your creativity to take your creations to the next level.

Create your stunning graphics using canva from canva.com

 

8.      Draw.io (app.diagrams.net)

Draw.io is now app.diagrams.net that allows you to create flow charts, infographics, UI mockups, and many more.

I personally use it to create images with a transparent background. It has an inbuilt library of many shapes to choose from.

 

Click here to and start creating your own diagrams.

 

9.      Wrike Calendars

Plan your day, block your calendars to set reminders, Visualize the goals. Be more efficient.

Wrike calendars allow you to create and color-code different calendars by status, channel, audience, or project type. You can also easily view different calendars individually or layered on top of one another.

Wrike calendar provides the best possible information via your work management tool so you can click on the calendar items and dive into tasks. It also allows you to adjust the due dates with ease.

To know more details and start using see wrike.com

10.   Spreadsheet compare

It is a standard windows program. Press the Windows key and type "spreadsheet compare". 

This tool can help you to manage complicated and herculean tasks. For example, you can compare two versions of the same workbook. You can also find potential problems, like manually-entered (instead of calculated) totals, or broken formulas, etc.

To know more details see Basic tasks in Spreadsheet Compare 

 

11.   Grammarly

Grammarly is the free writing assistant that can check the completeness and correctness of the sentence.

It can check for spelling, plagiarism, grammatical errors, completeness of sentences, and many more features. With the premium version, you can unlock the active voice and passive voice checker and much more for more detailed analysis.

Click here to get started.

 Conclusion

Tools are inevitable for carrying out the technical writing job. There are tools for authoring, illustration, work management, and various other web application, which are used on a day-to-day basis. For more information read 21 Trending Technical Writing Tools and Softwares in 2020

However, there are various free tools, some of them are already present in our desktop and we hardly know about them. Using these tools makes us more efficient and enables us to smart work.