The best productivity apps for Windows Phone 8

Try these office apps to connect with your colleagues, share documents and track your tasks and expenses whilst you are out and about.

Office Remote turns your smartphone into a remote that enables interaction with Microsoft Office on your PC. The app lets you control Word, Excel, and PowerPoint from across the room, so you can walk around freely during presentations whilst interacting with the screen.

You can start a PowerPoint presentation from your phone, use a laser pointer, see the next slide before advancing slides, jump to slides and play videos embedded in the presentation. You can view the speaker notes and timner

In Excel you can zoom into the spreadsheet, switch between worksheets and graphs, and use Pivot tables and filters.  In Word you can scroll through a Word document or jump to specific sections or comments.

Your PC needs Bluetooth and the desktop add in for Office Remote

Cost: Free

Box gives you 10GB of free storage and  lets you store, manage and work with your files and documents wherever you are, from any device.

Box lets you access and share your files to stay connected. It renders over 100 types of files and has viewers for PDF PowerPoint and Word for reviewing and presenting.

Cost: Free

MetroMail is a third-party email client for Windows Phone which includes all major Gmail-specific functionality including instant notifications. MetroMail allows you to attach multiple files from your OneDrive account and select individual tile colors for each account.

Tile counts are synced across all your devices. Gmail users also have support for inbox tabs and have server side search functionality. 

Cost: $1.49

My Expenses allows you to manage your expenses when out and about. You can create expense items for multiple accounts and categorise each transaction. Recurring items such as fixed costs can easily be created.

Data can be exported as a CSV, or uploaded to Dropbox. Expenses incurred to date can be summarised either by month or year to date and  see a summary of future expenses.

Cost: Free

Office Lens behaves like a scanner which enables you to take photos of whiteboards or blackboards. It makes images of whiteboards and docs (in English) readable using OCR, and saves them to OneNote or your camera roll.

You can share your meeting notes, make digital copies of printed documents, business cards or posters. It automatically trims and cleans up image glares and shadows in Whiteboard mode or in Document mode it trims and colors images.

Cost: Free

Skype on Windows Phone enables you to make free Skype to Skype video and voice calls as well as send instant messages to friends and family. You can make calls over 3G or WiFi. There are calls and message notifications when the app is closed.

Cost: Free

Tasks lets you plan, organize and monitor the progress of your projects. It syncs with Microsoft Exchange 2007 and above, and delivers notifications and reminders for due tasks. There is also the ability to sync with Office 365 and Telerik Cloud. 

You can create and share tasks, projects and categories across multiple devices, attach photos and voice memos to tasks.

Cost: Free

TeamViewer enables you to remotely control your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. You can use it for PC support of your family PC's, or access documents on your home PC even behind firewalls and proxy servers.

It uses Wake On LAN to switch on your computer or reboot your PC. It uses 256 Bit AES session encoding and 2048 Bit RSA Key Exchange. You can remotely lock your PC again after use.

Cost: Free

Weave News Reader is an RSS reader which saves your feeds and articles in the cloud to be accessible from any Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 device. You can save articles to OneNote or Pocket. Any articles marked as "read" on one device will be marked as such on your other devices.

If you mark an article as a favourite, it will be available to view from any other Weave clients.

Cost: $9.99 but you can install the or free version which has ads.

Yammer is an instant messaging and communications app which enables you to stay connected to the people and information you need in the office. You can collaborate, communicate, and share ideas. you can browse company conversations projects, and ask questions.

You can work in groups and receive push notifications on your device and open Office and PDF files with your phone's built-in apps.

Cost: Free

Yolu Card Reader reads business cards and scans them to your device. It displays scanned cards in the app and the cloud. It has multilingual support, group and exchange your cards with others.

Cost: Free