While you were busy with Apple's App Store and Google Play, Microsoft apps have quietly developed into something to reckon with. There are several apps, desktop as well as mobile, which will be an immense help to manage all your affairs.

The most understated app in the Microsoft environment is OneNote. It continues to evolve into a sensational organisational strategy tool. You can keep all the articles that you need for your research here and share them with your teammates. OneNote is especially helpful for students who want to organise their notes on the basis of classes, subjects or topics. It has a useful search function. You can have one notebook and divide it into different sections or have more than one. The OneNote free version is a built-in desktop and mobile app. The OneNote desktop app is really good. You do need to subscribe to Office 365 to use this. It has a large number of customisations and you can really do extensive professional work on it.

The reading apps are truly outstanding. OverDrive-Library eBooks & Audiobooks is an interesting app. It has a global network of more than 34,000 libraries. You can borrow ebooks, audiobooks and videos. The app is also an ebook reader. Books that you borrow will automatically be returned after the stipulated period. However, there is a catch - you need to be a member of a library that participates in this to access the app. Check if your local library is part of this network. If you are more inclined towards magazines, Zinio is the app for you. Most well-known magazines are found here: The Economist, New Scientist, Vogue, and Rolling Stones, to name a few. The nine categories include News, Sports, Tech, Lifestyle, Women, Men, Science, International and Arts.

It gets even better. The Book Bazaar Reader app gets free books from different sources such as Guttenberg, Flibusta, FeedBooks, FreeBooks and ManyBooks. The app supports epub, mobi, fb2, pdf and txt formats. The free app, Freda epub ebook reader, gets you 50,000 free titles that you can download and read. It too supports most formats. In case you are too busy to read, there is always Audible Text Reader that will read books to you while you are busy commuting. There are several apps you can use for cloud storage such as the Box and Dropbox, each offering 5GB of free cloud space. However, the bellwether of cloud storage is Microsoft's OneDrive. All cloud storage services have apps for the desktop.

Hungry for news? News360 gathers stories from different sources and gives you a live feed. Newsstand and Newsflow are other similar apps. But the surprise package is MSN Sports which is already installed on your system and which you have been ignoring all this while. The Eurosport.com app publishes more than 150 articles a day. If you are a sports newshound, you will get your pick.

For the aspiring culinarian, the All Recipes app will satisfy all, whether they are a hash slinger or epicure. If you are a health freak the Recipe+Nutrition Profiler will give you all the nutrition information you need for the dishes you make, albeit you will have to pay around Rs 500 for this app.

The photo editing apps will help to make it an interesting hobby. Fotor is one photo editor that can give Adobe Photoshop a run for its money. Apart from the entire basic photo editing, it also helps you enhance your photos by lending visual effects. There is RAW file conversion and even a collage creator. What more can you ask for? For the dedicated Adobe user there is the free Adobe Photoshop Express. Another excellent photo editing app is Fhotoroom.

For music aficionados, there is a whole collection of MP3 players and audio streaming apps. TuneIn Radio allows you to tune into almost any channel in the world. The Netflix app will delight even the most discerning movie buff with its serials and films that you can watch offline. Take a look at Musixmatch. It fetches you synchronised lyrics when you play a song in either iTunes or Windows Media Player. Last but not the least Bing and Skype are back with a bang and with new features and efficiency. Bing Translator gives Google Translate stiff competition and once you have tried the new Skype you will not want to leave it.

Make the most of your Windows 10 by digging into these apps.

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