App tips

Here are some tools to help you quit Mac apps automatically when you're not using them—plus a walkthrough of how to exit Mac apps manually.

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How to automatically quit apps on Mac when you're not using them

App comparisons

There are too many things on the internet to read at once. Read-it-later apps let you set aside articles or sites, download them to read at your convenience, and even organize them for research.

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Instapaper vs. Pocket: Which read-it-later app is best? [2025]

Best apps

Video conferencing software isn't niche anymore—it's the main place meetings happen. It's true in remote companies, it's true in hybrid companies, and it's increasingly true in companies that mostly work in physical offices.

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The best video conferencing software for teams in 2025

I find it hard to get work done while watching movies, visiting theme parks, or hanging out with my friends. So why do I think I can get work done online? Yes, the internet is a place where work happens, but distractions are always a click away.

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The 7 best apps to help you focus and block distractions in 2025

To-do lists help you remember tasks, prioritize them, and generally keep track of your work and life. Whether it's work assignments, books you want to read, or groceries you need to pick up, you won't remember them if you don't write it down.

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The 6 best to-do list apps for iPhone in 2025

Comparing Slack to Discord doesn't, at first glance, make sense. It's apples to oranges—or, more accurately, conference room to arcade—in terms of branding.

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Slack vs. Discord: Which should you use?

Reading things online is more interesting than most jobs. It's a big problem, and read it later apps are the solution. If you stumble upon an interesting article, or if someone sends one to you, you can send the article to a reading queue.

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The 4 best read it later apps to save content

RSS feeds are the ultimate power user tool for keeping up with the news. And if there's one thing a power user can't stand, it's clumsy software. For Mac users, that means the best choice is a native app. Here are the three best RSS readers for Mac.

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The 3 best RSS readers for Mac

Your phone works fine for quick notes on the go, but for a more fleshed-out note taking experience, you'll turn to your Mac.

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The 5 best note taking apps for Mac

Automation inspiration

Google Alerts make it easy to keep up with headlines on any subject, but there's one big downside: headlines are delivered via email. What if you'd rather keep up to date without keeping your inbox open? Turns out you can.

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How to track Google Alerts in Slack, Trello, or almost any app

Every Safari or Firefox user occasionally runs into a website or two that just doesn't play well with their browser. Here's how to fix that on a Mac.

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How to force a URL to open in a specific browser on a Mac

Your keyboard doesn't have an em dash symbol—here's what to do.

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How to type an em dash symbol on a Mac or Windows

Team chat apps aren't just tools—they're the modern office. That's obviously true for remote teams, but the appeal goes well beyond that. Companies that have a shared physical workspace increasingly depend on workplace chat to get things done.

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The 5 best team chat apps for business

You try to paste something in Google Docs. You get a cryptic message instead. Here's why—and how you can get around it.

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Why won't Google Docs let me paste without installing an extension? 

Journaling might be the most underrated activity that can boost your productivity and well-being in just a few minutes a day.

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The 4 best journal apps

Stop playing the password-guessing game. Here's how to find and share  your Wi-Fi password from your phone or computer. 

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How to find and share your Wi-Fi password

You can convert Word to Google Docs for each file—or make it the default setting.

How to convert Word docs into Google Docs

Zapier tutorials

Turn information from other apps into highly customized events on your Google Calendar with Zapier. Here's how.

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How to create detailed Google Calendar events using Zapier

Apple devices—including iPhones, iPads, and Macs—allow you to extract text from images using the Live Text feature, but there's no built-in way to do this in Windows. Here's one way to do it.

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How to copy text from an image or video on Windows

There are so many great Mac calendar apps, to the point where a Windows user might feel left out. You shouldn't, though, because Windows comes with a pretty great calendar app out of the box, and there are a few solid ones to check out beyond that.

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The best calendar apps for Windows

Here's how to to export all your Apple Notes, then import them into another note-taking app, like Notion, Joplin, or Obsidian.

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How to export Apple Notes

Your calendar isn't the most exciting thing on your phone, but it is one of the most useful. So it's important to have a calendar that has the features you're looking for, syncs with the services you use, and works the way you expect.

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The 7 best calendar apps for Android

Now that you've captured those leads, you and your sales team need to convert them into paying customers. And the faster you go about progressing them down the sales funnel, the better. Here's how.

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How to download leads from Facebook Lead Ads

Slack is a great way to coordinate. It can also be a great place to get information about your business in realtime—if you use automation..

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9 Slack automation ideas

Here's how to use Google's built-in optical character recognition (OCR) tool to convert image to text.

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How to convert image to text with Google Drive

Here's how to search any site or app directly from Chrome. 

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How to add a custom search engine to Chrome

Discord is similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but you wouldn't know that looking at the home page.

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Can you use Discord for business?

Apple Reminders used to be a barebones to-do list app, but that's not the case anymore.

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How to sync Apple Reminders with Microsoft To Do

If you like the idea of newsletters, but you don't like the idea of them taking over your inbox, here are four ways to get the best of both worlds.

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How to read newsletters without clogging up your inbox

Discover how to send yourself text messages for calendar events.

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Google Calendar shut down SMS notifications. Here's how to keep getting them.

Spotlight makes everything about using your Mac faster, which is why I think it's odd that Windows doesn't have anything like it.

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Use PowerToys Run to mimic Mac's Spotlight in Windows

App tutorials

Use these Google Forms features to make complex forms more manageable for the survey taker. 

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How to create form sections and logic in Google Forms

If a website isn't loading properly, you might want to clear your cache. Here's why it works and how to do it. 

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What is a cache? And why does clearing it fix things?

With a few tweaks, you can make your Google Calendar a source of calm—not chaos.

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5 stress-reducing Google Calendar settings you didn't know you needed

It's well established that silence is important for focus, but let's face it: silence isn't always an option.

Your iPhone, iPad, and Mac have white noise built in

When I'm at home, I plug my MacBook into an external monitor, effectively making it a desktop with two displays: my external monitor on the top, and my laptop below it.

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How to move the Dock on your Mac to a second monitor

RSS isn't dead, but it is harder to find RSS feeds than it used to be. Browsers no longer point them out, and websites rarely prominently link to them anymore. And yet, most sites do offer RSS feeds.

How to find the RSS feed URL for almost any site

Modern operating systems, including and macOS Ventura and Windows 11, offer both a light mode and a dark mode. Here's how to switch between them automatically.

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How to make Mac dark mode automatically (plus a workaround for Windows)

We spent time testing note-taking apps for Windows, and these are the ones that fit those needs best for most people.

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The best note-taking apps for Windows

There are no visible formatting tools in Discord, and yet other users are bolding words. How are they doing that? It turns out Discord uses a simplified version of Markdown for formatting. To bold text, put it between two pairs of asterisks.

How to bold in Discord

Here are a few applications that can add your calendar, complete with upcoming events, to your computer's wallpaper.

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How to add your calendar to your computer's desktop wallpaper

A lot of people use Zapier to send information over to Slack, which makes sense: It's a great way to automatically share information with the team. But that information is only going to make sense if it's formatted cleanly.

How to format a Slack message in Zapier

Use this Mac shortcut to switch between windows.

Alt + Tab on Mac: How to switch between windows on Mac

Can't find the right journaling app? Here's how to build your own with only the features you want.

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Hate every journaling app? Here's how to build your own.

Productivity tips

Two-thirds of people use some kind of automation software, according to a recent Zapier report. Of the remaining people who don't, 33 percent say they just can't imagine how it could be useful to them right now. I used to be one of those people.

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Automation is a habit—here's how to build it

Slackbots are handy robot assistants that hang out in Slack, wait for commands, then find or create the thing you need. You can build a Slackbot right now, in just a few minutes, without any code.

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How to build your own Slack bot

There isn't any easy way to share tasks with Google Tasks, but there's a workaround. See how to do it automatically with Zapier.

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How to share Google Tasks

Twitter shut down SMS notifications in most countries last week, meaning anyone who relies on that feature is currently out of luck. But there's a workaround. Before smartphones, Twitter was basically an SMS service.

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Twitter shut down SMS notifications. Here's how to keep getting them.

Change is the only constant. That doesn't mean you have to like it. 

How to move the Windows 11 taskbar back to the left

Because it comes with your Google account, Google Forms is an easy way to ask people for their information or opinions, but how can you ensure you'll act on that information? By sending every response over to your to-do list or task manager.

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How to turn Google Forms entries into tasks and projects

With Zapier, you can connect thousands of apps to create customized workflows. But when you go to connect your favorite apps, you might run into a few things those apps can't do.

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How Zapier's apps make your workflows even more powerful

One of the hardest parts of switching to Windows, for me, is the lack of Quick Look. This app gives me something similar.

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Quick Look is the best Mac feature. Here's how to add it to Windows.

Email is how the outside world communicates with your business, but not how your team talks to each other.

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Notify your team about Gmail emails in Google Chat

There are too many apps. Most of them don't talk to each other. Fixing this yourself is time-consuming and expensive.  That's the basic logic behind integration software, which makes it easy to connect all the software you use.

What is iPaaS? A guide to integration software

In most cases, switching from one tool to another isn't nearly the amount of work you think it will be. I'd go so far as to say that switching apps is, in most cases, simpler than you're imagining. 

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Switching apps isn't scary

We talk about automation a lot on the Zapier blog, and I really do believe that automating your work can give you time back in your day. But I don't think we should automate our work just to free up time to...do more work.

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Automate and chill: Put the computers to work so you don't have to

English is full of expressions that make no sense without context and even less with it. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is the best example I can think of. This expression isn't just literal nonsense—it's figurative nonsense.

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You can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Here's how to record your screen in Windows, Android, macOS, and on iPhone or iPad. 

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How to record your screen on any device

Remote and hybrid work used to be an edge case. They're not anymore and major software is changing to reflect that. 

 5 Google Calendar features every remote or hybrid team needs

It's bad enough that you have five Zoom meetings this morning. Why, when the meetings are done, do you have to come back to a browser with five "Launch Meeting" tabs? 

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How to automatically close those annoying "Launch Meeting" tabs from Zoom

Yelling at someone who actually ripped you off isn't effective because con artists don't care. Yelling at someone who is actually trying to help only alienates a potential ally.

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The time a dance instructor made me cry

Since we're all going to be wildly fluctuating on the good/in-between/bad spectrum for the foreseeable future, we might as well plan around it.

Use the good days to set yourself up for the bad ones

Google's work location tool will help everyone know who's in the office and who's working from home. Here's how to use it.

Every hybrid worker should enable this Google Calendar feature

Team chat apps make remote work easier. I'd even say they're what make remote work possible. But that doesn't mean team chat apps are only useful for remote work: these tools won't stop being useful just because your team is moving back to their desks. 

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Why messaging apps are still useful in the office

Simplicity is a big part of Typeform's appeal: you can set up a great-looking form or survey in just a couple of minutes. But that simplicity doesn't get in the way of customization. 

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4 hidden Typeform settings you should know about

Spend any time reading about software, and you'll see the words "open source," likely without any sort of explanation as to what that means. Why doesn't anyone bother explaining it?

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What is open source software?

If my manager ever texts me "hi", "hello", or "hey" without any further context, I will assume that I'm fired. It's the only logical conclusion. The same goes for "are you around?", "let me know when you get in," and "can we talk?"

Managers: Never just text your reports the word "hi"

As people start transitioning back into the office, I hope they'll take some of the lessons they learned from online meetings to improve the in-person ones. Here are four remote meeting rules that I think should follow us back to the office.

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4 video meeting rules that should follow us back to the office

Recently, Keren Kinberg, a frontend engineer here at Zapier, discovered a simple way to make her paper task list more effective: highlighting completed tasks instead of crossing them out.

Justin Pot

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