LibreOffice Portable is the largest of the portable apps here, but it's still amazingly compact considering it's a full office suite. Some portable apps have optional language files, which will add to the size considerably, so consider opting out of these unless you need a language other than English.

The program itself is an EXE file, but the extracted folder will also contain associated files including fonts and settings, which are essential for it to run. Other portable apps are provided as a regular ZIP file (opens in new tab) for you to extract yourself. Some portable apps have an ‘installer’, but don't worry – this just unzips a compressed file archive and saves the extracted files to a location of your choice it doesn’t make any changes to your system files. Portable apps have several advantages: they make it easy to switch between different computers because you can take your software with you, they don't interfere with any other programs installed on your PC, and they can be used on PCs with restricted user permissions (at work or school, for example). Provided there’s enough space available, you can store portable apps anywhere – an internal drive, an external storage device like a USB stick (opens in new tab) or SD card (opens in new tab), on a networked drive, or a cloud storage (opens in new tab) service like OneDrive or DropBox.

This allows you to use the Portable Apps dashboard to install, launch and manage multiple apps.Portable apps are programs that don't have to be installed, and don't change your PC's settings. Now, portable apps can be installed in two ways: You can download the portable installer from the software’s website and save it to your pen drive. Besides, your ‘cleaner’ computer will boot up faster, and you can also use these software on the go when your own PC is not at hand. Using these is as simple as plugging the USB stick into your machine, and clicking on the app to start.

In such cases, all you need to do is use a 16GB pen drive and pack it with the myriad software that you need. Also, it doesn’t make sense to install each and every software – most of which we might use occasionally – on our already packed computers. Why do you need portable apps? Well, we’re usually faced with a space crunch on our hard drives due to the huge file sizes that result from 4K and Full HD videos, 20MP photos, lossless audio rips, graphic-heavy games, and the sheer amount of data we store on our PCs.

Make any app portable