Awesome List of Windows Applications
This is a list of Windows applications that I already use or think that I might find useful in the future or that I find awesome for some other reason. That’s not to say that you would find them useful or even usable, this is only my opinion not a professional recommendation. All of these applications work on Windows 10.
Contents
Other Lists
Office
Tools for working with general business information.
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Microsoft Office - Love or hate it, it is the de facto standard and best of the bunch.
Incredibly powerful if you actually invest time in learning it. Most people don’t even if they use it constantly and so never really get the benefit of the time it can save if used correctly.
Not cheap and Microsoft heavily push you towards a subscription model.
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LibreOffice - Forked from OpenOffice when that came under Oracle’s control. Has some useful tools and can be good for fixing Office documents when Office breaks things!
Nowhere as easy to use or as powerful as MS Office in my view. But it is free for personal use.
While in theory also free for corporate/enterprise use, you should certainly expect to have to invest money not only in training (likely a lot more than for MS Office) but also for getting fixes and improvements in a timely fashion. Look carefully at the experiences of the German government before committing to this instead of MS Office.
Development
Tools to build or prototype other applications and services
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Electron - “Build cross platform desktop apps with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS”
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Microsoft Visual Studio Code - Currently, my favourite code IDE and editor. Has an awesome list of its own.
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Node-RED Top of my list. Graphical, flow-based development tool. Originally developed at IBM to showcase MQTT and IoT. More recently gaining popularity for creating web interfaces, bots and manipulating data. Donated to the JavaScript Foundation but still gets developer time from IBM.
A truly awesome tool. Even if you have little programming experience, you will find you can do a lot with this. I’ve made some contributions to new nodes, the forums, documentation and I use this for my Home Automation setup.
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TiddlyWiki - A reusable non-linear personal web notebook. Also has standalone and mobile versions.
Used this for some years not only as a notebook but also for weekly project reporting and other tasks. Also made some contributions to it. Great tool, a little complex to get your head round initially if you want to make full use of its capabilities. Basically wraps all the data and interactivity into a front-end html file with JavaScript doing the clever stuff.
ETL, Data Cleansing and Manipulation
Tools to get hold of, alter and write out data (Extract, Transform, Load - ETL)
- Microsoft Excel - v2016 now contains PowerQuery which is a very powerful point & click (& query language) based data manipulation capability.
Miscellaneous
Corrections and Contributions
- Corrections are always gratefully received
- Please check for duplicates before suggesting a new contribution
- Either create a pull request or raise an issue
- Keep descriptions short, simple and unbiased
Thanks for your help and support.