Must Have Software Every Student Should Know How to Use

BY DAVID GUTIERREZ

Today it is hard to imagine how students managed to deal with their immense workloads before computers became as ubiquitous as they are today. However, even if you actively use your PC for your everyday studying activities, chances are you don’t utilize its full potential. Here is the list of software tools that can further improve your efficiency and safety of your data.

1.    LibreOffice

Office software is certainly among the most crucial tools for a student, and the first one that comes to mind is most likely Microsoft Office. However, it has one significant drawback – it is quite expensive, especially if you take into account that most students hardly use more than 5 percent of its functionality. LibreOffice is a completely free and just as powerful alternative. Even if you have been using MS Office for your entire life, switching to it is no problem – its interface is slightly different in design, but that’s about all.

2.    R-Studio

We all know that it is important to make regular backups of our most vital data – hard drives fail and tend to do so at the least opportune moments. However, in reality, most of us tend to forget about it until it is too late. And there is hardly any less pleasant situation than having a huge assignment you’ve spent weeks or even months on wiped out due to hard drive failure or a power outage during the system update. R-Studio is a powerful tool aimed at solving this problem – in addition to simply restoring lost data, it is capable of even more impressive feats like encrypted disk recovery – even if your OS has been installed over an encrypted file system, there is a good chance that your data can be restored with its help.

3.    Acronis True Image

If you want to be even more protected from data loss, you can eliminate the element of randomness and human forgetfulness from your backups. Acronis True Image makes backup creation routine to be as easy as possible, allowing you to set the folders you want to be backed up, define how often you want it to be done and leave the rest to it.

4.    Cold Turkey Blocker

A PC is not just an awesome tool but a source of endless distractions as well. We all know this feeling: you have a huge, intimidating and extremely boring assignment to do and keep on finding pretexts to take a peek at this or that website just for a couple of minutes before you start… only to find out two hours later that you are watching your 43^rd cat video on YouTube. Cold Turkey Blocker is excellent for students who have trouble dealing with procrastination: it simply prevents you from visiting your favorite time-waster websites while you work. The paid version can even block applications.

5.    OneNote

Whatever discipline you study you are going to spend a lot of time doing, reviewing, analyzing and recompiling your notes. OneNote makes all related activities fast, easy and comfortable. In addition to that, it can serve as a sort of hub for all your work and shared files: you can attach articles to review them later on and share your notes with your fellow students to discuss some points. It has mobile versions, which means that your notes will always be at hand wherever you are.

There are, of course, hundreds of other useful software tools that can make students’ life easier, more comfortable and enjoyable, but these five can serve as an excellent foundation of your toolset – feel free to add to them as you like

David Gutierrez has worked in the field of web design since 2005. Right now he started learning Java in order to get second occupation. His professional interests defined major topics of his articles. David writes about new web design software, recently discovered professional tricks and also monitors the latest updates of the web development.