My Favourite Tipples from a business information researcher
Jinfo Blog

By Sophie Alexander

Abstract

My Favourite Tipples are shared by Sophie Alexander, business researcher and writer. She shares some of her favourite online resources, from those which help her create professional looking infographics and charts to more creative outlets in the interior design field.

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My work mainly involves a mixture of business research, writing and editing and these are just some of the tools that help me organise myself from day-to-day:

• Piktochart: This is a web-based application which lets you easily create professional looking infographics using templates. One of the key features of this product is its HTML publishing capability, which lets you create infographics that are viewable online or can be embedded into a website. You can also add interactive maps, charts, videos and hyperlinks. It has over 400 templates which users can edit. It's free to try out and prices start at around £12 a month.

• amCharts: This product offers tools for business data visualisation. It's compatible with mobile  devices, desktops and laptops as it adapts to whichever device you're using. It's customisable and provides lots of colours, layouts, styles and animations. It has an easy-to-use interface which means you can create and update data effortlessly. amCharts offers JavaScript Charts, allowing you to easily add charts to a website. They also offer JavaScript Stock Charts, for visualising and analysing large amounts of financial data and JavaScript Maps, which offers interactive mapping functionality.

• Grammarly: This is an app which analyses your writing and suggests improvements. As well as checking your grammar it also highlights repetitive words and homonyms, however, it doesn't currently support Google Docs. It doesn't pick up on all the ambiguities of language and sometimes makes incorrect suggestions but overall can be quite a useful back-up tool.

• TweetDeck: This is probably familiar to many people already but this social media dashboard application helps you manage all your Twitter accounts in one place and is free to use! It has a series of customisable columns which can be set up to display your timeline, mentions, direct messages, favourites, search results and hashtags. You can monitor and tweet from multiple accounts at the same time and tweets can be scheduled for later delivery. For added security you can also set up two-step verification.

For fun:

• Apartment therapy: I usually end up on here at some point during the week and especially like the house tours as you get to see the vast range of different styles people choose. It's got lots of useful tips to fit your lifestyle and taste as well as some great photography.

An article in Jinfo which I found particularly interesting:

• I often work with images and have to stay copyright-compliant so this article from Clare Painter, "Researching images and other copyright material online", was useful in highlighting some useful questions to ask before reusing someone else's content.

Contribute Your "My Favourite Tipples"

Would you like to share your "My Favourite Tipples" with the Jinfo audience? For contributor guidelines email catherine.dhanjal@jinfo.com or visit the Publish with Jinfo page.

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