Office on the go. Mobile apps that make your work more efficient and save you time.

If you do not use your smartphone only for calling, texting, playing games or scrolling through Facebook, then you almost certainly use at least one app that turns your phone into a small computer, as if by magic. If part of your work involves communicating with customers, clients, suppliers and the like, you have surely had to urgently track down the content of a particular email, a value in a spreadsheet or the name of a presentation. If you are not right next to your work computer, however, this can be a problem. Smart apps can help you avoid the stressful situations that arise before you get to it: they turn your phone into an extension of your computer, so you have continuous access to important data.

A great advantage of these apps is that you can use them on your phone and your computer at the same time. You only need to create one account, and the same data is shared across all your devices. So it does not matter whether you are in the office or have just jumped onto a tram. You can easily access your emails, spreadsheets or notes wherever you are. All you need is to be connected to the internet.

Below you will find a showcase of tested apps that will help you turn your phone into a mini version of a computer. Like most other apps, these come in free and premium versions. If you plan to use them as supplementary software, the trimmed-down versions will probably be sufficient. If you want to base your work management on these helpers, upgrade your account to the premium version.

Email client

Almost everyone uses email at work, and outside of work almost every internet user has an email account. There is no need to introduce its function. Because it is so widespread, it is now standard to access your work email from somewhere other than your work computer. There is a wide range of email clients, i.e. programmes for receiving, managing and sending email, for both Windows and iOS users. 

The probably best-known one, not least because of the number of Windows users, is the application from the Microsoft Office suite, Outlook. It can be used not only on Windows but also on iOS, in both its desktop and mobile versions.

Apple has developed its own mail client for its users, the Mail (Pošta) app. You can use it for free on both your computer and your phone. The range of features is naturally wider in the desktop version, but the mobile version is also sufficient for full-fledged email communication.

Documents, spreadsheets and presentations are always at hand

Since we have touched on MS Office, let’s take a closer look at the other programmes in this Microsoft package. Microsoft has also created mobile versions of its popular programmes, so you can view and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations not only from your desktop computer but also from your smartphone. They are again compatible with both Android and iOS, and the range includes mobile versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the Outlook mentioned above, and also OneNote, which is excellent for taking notes and all kinds of to-do lists.

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For iOS users, Apple offers free alternatives in the form of Pages (documents), Numbers (spreadsheets), Keynote (presentations), Notes/Reminders, again also available in mobile versions.

For writing, editing and sharing notes, organising projects and creating to-do lists, the popular programme Evernote will serve you perfectly. Once you have worked with it, you will quite possibly never go back to other notebooks. Notes can easily be grouped into notebooks, so each project can be kept separately. If a project is made up of smaller sub-projects, you can group the notes together or split them up again when the project is finished. You can insert images, documents or even recorded speech into each note, so you will always have everything at hand in one place.

If you want to keep things in order, make full use of your working time and not forget anything, automate your work with notebooks and create to-do lists. You will see how much this way of organising your work helps to make your creative activities more efficient.

Off to the cloud

The cloud can save you when tackling many work tasks. The days when you had to use email attachments to back up spreadsheets or share them between devices or users are long gone. Sending documents by email is now a rather archaic solution, and if you learn to work properly with virtual storage, it will save you a lot of time and effort. Apart from making it easy to find your saved files practically anywhere, its undeniable advantage is that you can share them with anyone you like and, if you grant them the appropriate rights, they can edit the documents remotely in real time and make the necessary changes.

One of the most user-friendly cloud solutions is probably Dropbox. If you want to be sure you can reach your documents from anywhere, needing only a computer, phone or tablet and an internet connection, download this app. Dropbox is a cloud storage service that behaves like a standard folder on your device. Its controls are therefore very intuitive and clear. If you are offline, there is no need to worry that your changes have not been saved: they simply wait until you connect and then upload themselves to the internet. Because of its nature, Dropbox is not demanding to use, and you need not worry that it will take a while to get used to. You can share documents with anyone you like using a generated link, and you can also share entire folders, with the option of granting editing rights to other users.

When it comes to cloud storage, we certainly cannot overlook the very popular solution from Google either. Thanks to its applications, you can save files of various formats to the virtual drive, edit them and share them with other users. Besides storage (Drive), Google also offers the option of creating Docs, Sheets and Slides. And with the Photos app, you can also have your own photo gallery in the virtual world, shared across all your devices.

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Updated 5 March 2024