Category Archives: Free

Easel.ly

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Easel.ly is a simple web tool for creating and sharing infographics, posters, and other visuals with no design experience needed. They provide the canvas, you provide the creativity.

How it is useful to technical communicators:

While perhaps not ideal for high-end designs, Easel.ly is an excellent tool for quickly creating vibrant, punchy infographics that convey information through organized visual templates. Use Easel.ly for presentations, as visual aids accompanying other information, or for general diagramming and flowcharts.

Learn more:

You can access Easel.ly on any web browser http://www.easel.ly/. Both free and pro ($3/month) account options are available.

Other software like it:

Infogr.am, Visual.ly

Google Drive

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Google Drive provides access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more. Besides providing access-anywhere file storage, Drive is also your main access to the Google Suite of tools, including Docs, Slides, Sheets, Forms, and others.

How it is useful to technical communicators:

Google Drive is a great file storage system. However, its value to technical communicators comes from its capability for supporting real-time collaboration and editing. Multiple users can be given access to view, comment on, or edit files, thus enabling a great method for collaboration when users are in disparate geographic locations.

Learn more:

When signed in to a (free) Google account, you can access Google Drive for that account on any web browser at https://www.google.com/drive/. You can also access Drive from the mobile app available for free on app stores.

Other software like it:

Dropbox, OneDrive

Toggl

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Toggl is a time-keeping app for logging one’s hours spent on projects (or anything, really).

A technical communicator may juggle a variety of roles as an independent consultant for multiple clients as well as a full-time student. You might need something to track your billable hours, as well as to record how much time you spend on schoolwork, so you can prioritize better and make time to have a life.

Similar apps that may be found on the Google play store include Timesheet, aTimeLogger, Time Tracker.  But I really love Toggl; I’m toggling right now.

Sway

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Sway is a Microsoft software for presentations and storytelling. I wanted a jazzier presentation format for a Digital Humanities project, one that would let me embed multimedia components and stretch across a four-wall 360 presentation space. It had to be shareable over the web.  Learn more at Getting Started with Sway.

Similar tools to consider include Microsoft PowerPoint and Prezi.

Marqueed

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Marqueed is a Web application that allows users to share image files and comment on and mark-up those image files.

Marqueed is useful for collaborating on images remotely. While numerous tools exist for commenting on and editing text with others online, fewer tools are available that allow users to comment on and edit images online. As the jobs of technical communicators expand beyond producing text—and as technical communication jobs move to remote workspaces—collaboration tools such as Marqueed become more valuable.

You can sign up for an account and begin using Marqueed on the product’s Web site.

Google Drive can be used in a similar fashion, but it is not designed specifically with discussing images in mind.

GoVisually is a similar Web application to Marqueed that has a few more features but with a less simple design and use.