18 handy free web tools

Posted by Anne Witton on Tuesday, March 2, 2021 Under: Resources

There are some little things that you want to be able to do quickly with the minimum of fuss, and without faffing around with big and complicated software downloads, or firing up a whole office suite.

I thought I’d share with you the tools I have bookmarked over the years to help me work more efficiently. Whether you want to work out how long a talk will take to give, get hold of a temporary email address, manipulate an image or calculate the time between two different dates, hopefully you’ll find these links useful (in alphabetical order).

Background noise – Coffitivity (free with paid option). Sometimes it helps to have a bit of background noise when you’re working rather than complete silence. The free version of Coffitivity give you the option of ‘Morning Murmur’, ‘Lunchtime Lounge’ and ‘University Undertones.’
Case converter - Convert Case (free). If you’ve accidentally left Caps Lock on or if you’re copying some text that’s all in capitals, you can quickly and easily convert the case with this handy tool. It also features a character count and word count.
Currency convertor (free). Check live market rates on all major world currencies.
Date calculator (free). Add to or subtract from any date.
HTML Colour codes (free). A quick and easy way to find out what a particular colour is so that you can use it in logos and design. You can enter a web address or upload an image and just point the colour you want to know about.
Image tools (free). A suite of image tools from the makers of the text tools. Includes the ability to add text to image, pixilate an image, make an image transparent, convert lots of image formats, add a border and loads more.
Map tools (free). This is more like a suite of tools with so much on offer. Work out distances and areas; find places within a radius; work out how far you can travel in a set time; save a route on a map and loads more. Great for planning trips or working with geographic data.
Plain text editor - EditPad (free). If you want to quickly make a note of something or if you want to strip the formatting out of some copied text before pasting it into another document, this is a brilliant tool. I use it all the time as it’s so simple and effective.
Productivity timer - Marinara Timer (free). This has a Pomodoro timer to help you take regular breaks in your working day. You can also set up a custom timer to fit round your working patterns.
Random generator (free). You never know when you might need a random country / animal / date / number / letter, but when you do, this is the place to go.
Read time (free). This is a great way to work out how long and article or blog post is going to take to read, for your own information or to assist visitors to your site.
Sort list (free). Paste your list and sort it according to various criteria including alphabetically, naturally or random.
Speech calculator (free). If you’re giving a talk and want to know roughly how long what you have written will take to present, this is a great tool. You can choose fast, average or slow delivery speed. I’ve found it to be pretty accurate and very handy.
Temporary email (free with paid version). Sometimes you need a temporary email for filling in a form or signing up for a download. This is a quick and easy way to get one.
Text tools (free). Another collection of tools. There are far too many to list, but some of the most useful and interesting ones are: Create image from text; Remove duplicate lines; Extract a text fragment; Reverse text…
Time zones (free). Work out the time anywhere in the world. Great for planning meetings with people in different countries.
Timer, alarm, stopwatch, countdown (free). Doesn’t really need any explanation!
Unit convertor (free). Convert pretty much anything including length, temperature, area, volume, weight and time.