Meet the Most Useful Windows 10 Apps in the Microsoft Store

A Guide to Little Known but Helpful Microsoft Products

There’s more to Microsoft than just Office, Outlook, and Edge. Here’s a look at other useful programs.

You may use Microsoft Office, Outlook, Edge, Cortana, and other key Microsoft apps and programs. But those are just the main events. The folks in Redmond offer a variety of other products, especially for your mobile device.

• You can use Microsoft Office Lens to scan printed files and save them as Word documents or PDFs.
• You can use Microsoft Photos Companion to wirelessly send photos from your phone to your PC.
• You can use Microsoft Launcher on your Android device to tweak your home screen to make it more Microsoft-friendly.
• You can turn to Microsoft Translator when you need to translate something on the fly.
• And you can use Microsoft Authenticator to easily sign into your Microsoft Account.

Let’s check out these helpful Microsoft apps.

Microsoft Office Lens

Need a way to scan printed documents via your mobile phone? The free Microsoft Office Lens app can serve that role.

Through Office Lens, you can digitize and store documents, photos, business cards, and other types of printed files by snapping them with your device’s camera. You can then save the scans as PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, or OneNote files. You can also send the images to your mobile photo gallery or to Microsoft OneDrive.

Need to share the scan with someone else? No problem. You can share an image via email, Facebook, Twitter, and other apps and services. As a standalone program, Office Lens is available for Windows 10, iOS, and Android. Office Lens also integrates directly into the latest version of OneDrive for iOS.

Microsoft Photos Companion

Getting your photos from your phone to your computer can be a challenge. Sure, you can always email them to yourself. You can connect your mobile device to your PC and copy or move the images through File Explorer.

You can also save your photos to an online service such as Google Photos. But another option is to wirelessly transfer your photos through the free Microsoft Photos Companion app.

Geared for iOS and Android, Photos Companion talks to the Windows 10 Photos app. Follow these steps:

1. Open the Photos app on your PC.
2. Select the Import icon and choose the option for From mobile Over Wi-Fi. S
3. can the onscreen barcode from the Photos Companion app on your mobile phone.
4. Select the photos you want to transfer, and they appear on your PC in a special folder.

Photos Companion is still in the testing stage, so it can be buggy. Sometimes it fails to transfer all the photos, especially if you’re copying a lot all at once. But overall it’s a fast and effective tool.

Microsoft Launcher

Not happy with the default screens and layout on your Android phone or tablet? You can spruce them up with the free Android launcher known as Microsoft Launcher.

With an Android launcher, you can tweak your screen to better match the way you use your phone. And if you already work with such apps as Microsoft Office, Edge, and Cortana, the Microsoft Launcher is an ideal choice.

Download and install Microsoft Launcher from its page at Google Play. Open the launcher and sign in with your Microsoft Account. From the newly-created Microsoft folder, you can download apps for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Edge, OneDrive, Skype, and LinkedIn.

Next, you can set up your Microsoft feed by customizing the sections for certain Microsoft services, such as Calendar, News, Cortana, Documents, and People. By tweaking the feed, you can give yourself quick and easy access to the Microsoft services you use most frequently.

Since this is an Android app, you can also set up widgets to specific Microsoft apps so they’re visible on your home screen. Finally, you can jump to the launcher’s Settings screen where you can modify the wallpaper, set your default search engine, customize Cortana, and personalize other elements.

Microsoft Translator

Whether you need to translate a sign, a menu, or a conversation, Microsoft Translator can come to your rescue.

Designed for Windows, Android, iOS, and the Apple Watch, this free app can serve as your own universal translator on the go. After setting your source and target languages, speak or type the word or phrase you wanted to be translated. The app then displays and reads the translation.

You can also point your camera at a printed item that you want to be translated, and the app displays the translation onscreen.

And here’s a really cool feature: You want to talk with someone who speaks a different language. If that person also runs Microsoft Translator on his or her mobile device, then the two of you can engage in a back-and-forth conversation. Anything you speak or type in your own language is translated to the other person’s language and appears on his or her screen. Anything that person speaks or types then appears on your screen in your own language. Microsoft Translator handles more than 60 different languages.

Microsoft Authenticator

A Microsoft Account is a handy way to use the same credentials for Windows, Office, and all your other Microsoft software and services. But since you’re using the same account across the board, you want to make sure it’s secure and protected. And you may also want to eliminate the hassle of having to type your password each time you sign in with your account.

The free Microsoft Authenticator app can help with both challenges. Available for Android, iOS, and the Apple Watch, the authenticator serves as an alternative to your regular password.

When you try to log in with your Microsoft Account, a message is sent to your mobile device asking you to approve the sign-in. After the approval, you then sign in using whatever authentication method you’ve set up on your mobile phones, such as a PIN, a fingerprint, or facial recognition. Alternatively, Microsoft Authenticator flashes a PIN on your mobile device that you must enter at the Microsoft app, service, or webpage to which you want to sign in. As long as your mobile device remains safe and secure, then your Microsoft Account is protected.

Ask @WinObs: What Are the Most Useful Windows 10 Apps in the Microsoft Store?

Q. What are the most useful apps you have found in the Microsoft Store on Windows 10?

A. You all know I am an undeniable fan of Windows 10. Of course, you see that Windows 10 tends to be the subject of the two weekly articles I write for Windows Secrets. So, no secrets here about my focus on Windows 10 and experience with it along the way.

Over the last three and a half years, a lot of operating system functionality has moved from the OS itself to what I call helper apps. Many users also call them inbox or built-in apps. However, for the purposes of answering this question, I am not going to include these apps in my list. This list is going to focus on the other apps I install as I setup or reset an existing system.

Caveat: I will choose to use the Microsoft Store app version of a piece of software versus a separate downloadable desktop install of the program.

OneNote for Windows 10

Although this app does get installed by default when you start with Windows 10, I include it here because it’s not part of the operating system. This service is part of Microsoft Office and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version has grown a lot since its first iteration back on Windows 8/8.1.

The OneNote for Windows 10 app will be the default OneNote interface for those who use Office 2019. (The only exception to this will be anyone using the OneNote 2016 desktop program, as that will remain their default, but users will get a prompt to try out/migrate to the UWP app.)

Now that I’m using OneNote for Windows 10, I have moved nearly all my physical note-taking and related tasks into the digital non-paper world. The recent addition of Sticky Notes and its sync capability, which is provided by the OneNote engine, has now replaced most of my scribbled notes/reminders across Windows 10 and my Samsung Galaxy S9+.

The UWP app is also very quickly gaining feature parity with its desktop predecessors. If you have not tried this Microsoft Store version out recently then I recommend giving it a fresh look.

Paint.net

This is one of the most advanced free image editors available and it has been around for a long time. It is well supported by its author, and while you do pay for the version that is in the Microsoft Store (it is a freeware download from their website), it’s a solid investment at just $3.49.

I edit a lot of images in my daily work routine and this app allows me to perform most of those edits including features such as working with layers, adjustments (Auto-Level, Black and White, Brightness and Contrast, Curves, Hue and Saturation, Invert Colors, Levels, Posterize, and Sepia), plus multiple effects (Artistic, Blurs, Distort, Noise, Photo, Render, and Stylize).

Call it Paintshop Pro for the poor, but this app will exceed your expectations with its extensive capabilities.

Irfanview

While Irfanview provides multiple editing options, although not as extensive compared to Paint.net, the reason this app has a spot on my system is because it has extensive Batch Conversion and Rename tools.

You can take large or small collections of images and set a wide array of options including cropping, resizing, changes of color depth, plus horizontal/vertical flipping, left/right rotation, conversion to grayscale, and adding overlay text or watermarks to get them into the specific configuration you need of your images. Even for a small set of images, the speed of this process once setup is much faster than editing images one by one.

Nextgen Reader

The death of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds has been talked about ever since Google killed off their Google Reader service back in July 2013. RSS feeds haven’t gotten the message; they’re still going.

A new service called Feedly benefitted greatly from the end of times for Google Reader. There were reports that they gained 500,000 new users within two days of the initial announcement about Google Reader going away and added three million more in the next two weeks.

Nextgen Reader was already in the Microsoft Store a couple of years before the end of Google Reader was coming and supporting the service just by adding your Google Reader account. When the end was approaching for Google Reader, Nextgen Reader was the only Windows-based app that was partnered with Feedly to gain programmatic access to the service for Windows users.

The developer of Nextgen Reader is very responsive to issues and feedback. As a result, we now have a Feedly client that just works and does that job very well. Lots of configuration options exist to customize how you use the app and share information from your RSS feeds. Included is the ability to connect to services such as Twitter, OneNote, Facebook (including FB Pages), Buffer, Pocket, and Instapaper.

Yes, I could use Feedly via their web interface, but the functionality added to the process of working with and utilizing the more than 120 feeds I read through each day with Nextgen Reader just makes the process so much more efficient.

Note: Feedly has a free account that you can sign up for and it is more than capable of handling most everyday RSS feed users.

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So what apps from the Microsoft Store on Windows 10 do you install right away? On the flipside, are there any you uninstall immediately after getting a new Windows 10 device up and running?