Many people have been taken aback by the corona virus and its impact on daily work. Who the job allows, and who was sent to the home office overnight might face major challenges. For example, that the known programs from the office are not an option for at home due to cost or setup reasons, but are still needed there. If you are currently looking for temporary solutions in your home office, you may find the right tool in these practical and, above all, free programs.
The most important office functions
A license for Microsoft's Office 365 Personal costs 69 euros per year. The most important functions such as word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel) or presentations (PowerPoint) also offer open source programs. If you don't want to spend money on the hopefully not too long forced time in the home office, take a look at the potent alternatives such as LibreOffice or OpenOffice. The automatic spell checker may not be as sophisticated as in Word, but overall they offer almost all the features of Microsoft Office.
If you are looking for a reliable program for playing various video files, you should take a look at the VLC media player. At first glance, its street hat icon does not necessarily make it attractive, but it is free and comes with all the important codecs.
Photoshop alternative
First of all: The free alternatives don't come close to the almost endless options of a Photoshop. However, for the powerful image editing program from Adobe, 23.79 euros per month or 285.37 are due in advance for one year. If you want to get as close as possible to the functional range of Photoshop, the Gimp program is the right choice. The free tool also offers layer editing, automatic improvements and filters.
If you only want to crop, combine or change the file size / number of pixels anyway, you can basically get the most out of it. Paint.NET also offers many options in this regard, with XnView images can also be managed clearly and Lightbox Free also helps, to name just a few.
Orga app instead of slipping away
The colleague is waiting for an answer, as is a customer and there is still an important submission date. In the home office in particular, it is sometimes particularly difficult to think of everything. Various organizational apps can help here, which remind you of appointments, work and tasks. For example, Wunderlist can be used to create to-do lists (not just for work).
The same applies to the classic organization application, Evernote. In the free version, many practical tasks can be done with it. This also applies to Trello, where users can intuitively arrange lists like on a blackboard.