Haley Kruse here… I’m the manager at Nerd HQ. Beth Z, aka Your Nerdy Best Friend, is taking a couple of days off this week to vacation with her hubby, so I’m stepping in to share some great apps that help me as a work-from-home mom of two.

PDF Help

Does anyone else have a hard time with PDFs or is it just me? I don’t have to do much with PDFs most of the time so I haven’t been willing to spend the money on Adobe. The ease of working with the paid version of Adobe is amazing but not worth the money if you don’t use it often. I have tried some of the free online PDF fillers with not much luck. I need the ability to edit, sign and sometimes reorganize pages. The free version of Adobe will allow you to sign, but it only allows for two signatures to be saved and you can’t upload images. It will certainly work for some people, but since I have a few clients that I work for I need the option to add more signatures.

After talking this through with Beth and doing a little digging myself, here are a couple of tools that I found helpful:

Dropbox now allows you to edit, sign, and request signatures. I use Dropbox for everything anyway so this is a great option. Did you know that they have also added automations to Dropbox?
PDFescape is a free, online option that you do not have to create an account to use which I love because I (and I’m sure everyone else) have way too many sign-ins.

Magic Writing Tools

Jasper AI: I’ll be honest, writing is not my forte- Beth introduced me to Jasper AI and I am loving it!

Here’s an example of what it can do. I typed in a few words about PDF problems and such and it gave me this whole paragraph which really is worded better than my paragraph above. This is a great shortcut for those who need a jump start with writing.

Jasper AI Paragraph:
Juggling two kids while working from home can be tricky, but luckily I have a Nerdy Best Friend to lend me a hand. Dealing with PDFs is one of those tasks that’s been giving me trouble, and when Adobe costs an arm and leg there has to be another solution! Luckily, free online fillers exist – they just don’t always cut it for someone like me who needs the ability to edit pages without restrictions on signatures or images. For most people, this won’t matter much though so maybe check out what you get for nothing first!

Tools to Stay on Time and Organized

LastPass– LastPass has been the biggest help for me so I can have different passwords for everything and I don’t have to remember them. I am following Beth’s updates regarding the hack, but I hope to be able to continue using this tool.

Grammarly– I added Grammarly to my Chrome browser so when I am typing an email real quick while my kids are eating their 10th snack of the day it will catch my errors.

Google Calendar– I have always been a paper planner person (I love them!) and I still use one, but mostly just because it’s a habit. I could not live without my Google Calendar. I have a family calendar, Beth’s calendar, my own calendar, and so on. This is the only thing keeping my busy days in order.