iluvfreetools
Site & safety46 of 46

Risk assessments, method statements, SWMS and job hazard analyses, for the UK, US, Australia and Canada. Finished documents, no empty boxes left for you.

All 46 ›
Structure & materials35 of 35

Steel, timber, concrete, brickwork, boards, groundworks and roofs. Section data, indicative sizing, quantities and the reference tables you normally go hunting for.

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Home & property32 of 32

See what it would look like before you commit, then work out what it takes. Upload a photo of your own wall, drive or house and try things on it.

All 32 ›
Invoices & docs20 of 20

Invoices, quotes, receipts and the rest of the paperwork, generated properly. No account, no watermark, and Download is the only button.

All 20 ›
Money & tax39 of 39

Wages, mortgages, tax and the everyday sums. What you actually take home, what it actually costs, and what you actually owe.

All 39 ›
People & hours46 of 46

Rotas, rosters and schedules, holiday and PTO, timesheets and staff paperwork. The admin that eats a Sunday evening, done in ten minutes.

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Business & marketing50 of 50

Starting up, getting found and keeping the admin straight. Everything downloadable, nothing paywalled at the last step.

All 50 ›
PDF & documents27 of 27

Merge, split, crop, sign, number and compress. Everything runs in your browser, so the contract you open here never reaches a server.

All 27 ›
Image tools24 of 24

Convert, resize, compress, crop and adjust. All of it on your own machine, with no upload, no account and no watermark on anything.

All 24 ›
Text & dates20 of 20

Word counts, case, days between dates, working days and ages. The ten-second look-ups, with no account and nothing stored.

All 20 ›
Random & party27 of 27

Secret Santa, draws, brackets, sweepstakes, printables and party quantities. The bit that is just for fun, done properly.

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Training & tests21 of 21

Practice tests for the cards and licences that decide whether you can work. Every answer cites the guidance it came from, not a forum.

All 21 ›

20 free tools. No sign up.

Text & dates

Word counts, case, days between dates, working days and ages. The ten-second look-ups, with no account and nothing stored.

Show tools for

A tool that works anywhere counts under every country, which is why these add to more than 20. A badge on a tile means it is built for specific markets.

Text

12

Word counts, case conversion, diffs, notepads, line tools and symbols.

Word & character counterLive word, character, sentence and reading-time count as you type.Case converterUpper, lower, title, sentence, camel or snake case in one click.Text compareSee which words changed, and what the invisible characters are.Online notepadSaves as you type, keeps earlier versions, and recovers a note you deleted.Symbol & emoji libraryCopy anything you cannot type, with the lookalike characters named.Line toolsSort, dedupe, number and trim a list, in the order that gets it right.Find & replaceBulk replace with a preview of every line it changes, plain or regex.Lorem ipsum generatorPlaceholder by paragraphs, words or an exact character count.Remove line breaksUnwrap text from a PDF, keeping the paragraphs and repairing split words.Word frequencyWhich words and phrases you have used most, and how often.Checklist makerBuild a checklist, print it, send it as a link with no account.Markdown editorLive preview, an outline, and conversion both ways with HTML.

Dates & time

7

Days between dates, working days, age, week numbers and time zones.

Days between datesHow many days, weeks or months between any two dates.Date add & subtractWhat date is 30, 60 or 90 days from a date, forwards or backwards.Working days calculatorUKBusiness days between dates with the right bank holidays for each UK nation.Age calculatorExact age in years, months and days on any date.Time zone meeting plannerA slot that works across London, New York and Sydney, with the date change flagged.Week number calculatorWhich ISO week a date falls in, plus a full year calendar.Unix timestamp converterEpoch to a readable date and back, with the seconds-or-milliseconds trap caught.

Generators

1

Passwords, passphrases and PINs, generated on your own device and never sent anywhere.

Password generatorPasswords, passphrases and PINs from the browser cryptographic random source.

The small things you look up ten times a week

  • Word and character counts as you type, with reading time and the platform limits you are near.
  • Case conversion.
  • Comparing two versions of something, to see exactly what changed.
  • A notepad that saves as you type and needs no account.
  • Sorting, de-duplicating and shuffling a list of lines.

None of it is clever and all of it is quicker than opening a document to do it.

Dates, which are less obvious than they look

Days between two dates, what date is ninety days from now, exact age on any date, and which ISO week a date falls in.

Working days carry the commercial weight. Business days between two dates with the right bank holidays for England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which are not the same set. Payment terms, notice periods and statutory deadlines all resolve to a working day calculation, and a bank holiday you forgot is how a deadline gets missed.

The British split is not a British quirk, it is the normal arrangement. <strong>None of these four countries has one national list.</strong> America sets federal holidays that many states extend with their own. Australia sets them state by state, so a national deadline lands on a working day in one capital and a holiday in another. Canada splits them between federal and provincial, which means a federally regulated employer and the shop next door can be closed on different days. So a working day calculation is a question about a jurisdiction rather than about a country, everywhere, and the tool asks you which one for that reason.

Generators, and the one that is worth a paragraph

Lorem ipsum when a layout needs filling before the copy exists, checklists you can actually print, and a markdown editor that shows the result as you type. None of these is clever. All of them are the thing you wanted at the moment you wanted it, which is the entire brief for this hub.

The password generator is the one that deserves more than a line, because where a password comes from decides whether it is worth having. It is built on this page from your own browser <strong>cryptographic random source</strong>, not generated on a server and sent to you, and that distinction is the whole point: a password that travelled to you across the internet has already been somewhere it should never have been.

The other half is what makes a password strong, and the modern answer is not the one most people were taught. <strong>Length beats complexity</strong>, comfortably. A long passphrase you can type from memory is stronger than a short scramble of symbols, and it is stronger precisely because you will not write it on a note stuck to the monitor. Forced special characters and ninety day expiry both make passwords worse in practice, which is why the current NIST guidance dropped them.

Commonly asked questions & answers

Why does my word count differ from Word?

Because nobody agrees what a word is, and the disagreements are all defensible. A hyphenated compound can be one word or two. A number with a decimal point can be one or several. An em dash with no spaces round it can glue two words into one. Text in a header, a footnote or a text box may or may not be counted at all. None of that is a bug in either tool, and the practical answer is to use one counter for the whole job rather than reconciling two, because a limit set in one and checked in another will always have a gap.

What is an ISO week, and why does it not match the month?

It is a week numbering scheme that cares about whole weeks rather than about months, which is exactly why it does not line up. An ISO week always starts on Monday, and week 1 is the week containing the first Thursday of the year, which means the first days of January can belong to week 52 or 53 of the year before and the last days of December can belong to week 1 of the next. Some years have 53 weeks. If a report says week 1 and you assume it began on 1 January, you can be a week out.

Why do Unix timestamps start in 1970?

Because somebody had to pick a date and that one was convenient at the time, which is the whole of the reason. A Unix timestamp counts seconds since 1 January 1970 UTC, so it is a single number with no time zone, no daylight saving and no calendar in it, which is exactly why systems store it and humans cannot read it. Two things catch people: some systems count milliseconds instead of seconds, so a timestamp a thousand times too big is usually that, and dates before 1970 are negative.

Why does text pasted from a PDF come out with odd characters?

Because what looks like an apostrophe usually is not one. Documents are full of typographic characters that look almost identical to the ones on your keyboard: curly quotes, en and em dashes, non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens that only appear when a word wraps. Paste that into something plainer and they turn into question marks, boxes or nothing at all. It is not corruption, it is a different character that your destination cannot display. Find and replace fixes it if you search for the character rather than the one you think it is.

What is the difference between a line break and a paragraph?

One ends a line and one ends a block, and mixing them is why pasted text falls apart. Text copied out of an email or a PDF often has a hard break at the end of every visual line, because that is where the line happened to end in the original column width. Paste it somewhere narrower and it reflows into a ragged mess. Removing line breaks correctly means stripping the ones inside a paragraph while keeping the ones between paragraphs, which is a different operation from removing all of them.

Why does an international meeting go wrong twice a year?

Because the countries change their clocks on different dates, and for a few weeks the usual gap is not the usual gap. Britain and the European Union shift in late March and late October; America and Canada shift in March and November; most of Australia moves in the opposite direction because it is the other hemisphere, and large parts of it do not move at all. So a call that is always 4pm to 9am can quietly become 4pm to 10am for a fortnight. Fix it by agreeing the time in each participant local time rather than in an offset.

Is somebody born on 29 February a year older on the 28th or the 1st?

Legally it depends where they are, which is a genuinely unsatisfying answer and the correct one. Most systems treat the birthday as falling on 28 February in a common year, some treat it as 1 March, and a few statutes say so explicitly for things like reaching an age of majority. Arithmetic tools normally take the 28th because it keeps the person inside the right month. If the date decides something that matters, such as an entitlement or a licence, check the rule that governs that thing rather than trusting any calculator.

Why does the same text look different in two apps?

Usually the font rather than the text, and occasionally the encoding. If characters are missing or replaced with boxes, the font does not contain them and the system has substituted another: common with symbols, accented letters and emoji. If the characters are wrong rather than missing, something has read the bytes with the wrong encoding, which is why a stray pound sign turns into two odd characters. Saving as UTF-8 solves almost all of the second kind and none of the first.

Source: UTF-8, RFC 3629

Can you count words in a language that has no spaces?

Not reliably by counting spaces, which is what almost every counter does. Chinese, Japanese and Thai do not separate words with spaces, so a space-based count returns something close to one, and a character count is the meaningful measure instead. It matters more than it sounds because limits are usually written in one language and applied to another: a field capped at 280 characters holds a very different amount of information in English than in Japanese, where a single character can carry a whole word.

Why does find and replace miss things I can see?

Nearly always an invisible difference rather than a mistake. The commonest three: a non-breaking space that looks exactly like a space and is a different character, a curly apostrophe where you typed a straight one, and trailing whitespace at the end of a line. Case sensitivity is the fourth, and the one people check first. If a search fails on text you can plainly see, copy the text out of the document itself and paste it into the search box rather than retyping it, which sidesteps all four at once.