PowerToys, the free suite of Microsoft user tools, has added a subtly powerful feature: Advanced Paste, which applies AI to a group of data that you've cut or copied, or wish to paste elsewhere. It's a weird but surprisingly cool concept, geared toward developers but with applications in a variety of different areas. In 2023, we listed all of the various tools within PowerToys: from FancyZones to Image Resizer to a suite of Mouse Utilities, plus a lot more. Microsoft provides PowerToys as an installer, with the ability to download and run any of the apps you want. Now you can add Advanced Paste to the list.

If you use Windows, you want PowerToys. This collection of open-source goodies, guided and published by Microsoft itself, is one of the best free software packages out there, and we can't recommend it enough. That only becomes more true today, as the company publishes an updated version with three brand new tools: the previously-spotted Text Extrator (an Optical Character Recognition tool), a ruler for measuring pixels on your screen, and a tool for quickly inserting little-used accents into text. Text Extractor is probably the most universally-applicable addition here. It's an open-source version of Joseph Finney's paid Text Grab app, now integrated into PowerToys and free for Windows users.

We love us some PowerToys here at PCWorld, and it seems the semi-official add-on for Windows power users is only getting better. A recent update to the GitHub project for PowerToys indicates that "PowerOCR" is in the latter stages of approval and should land in the official app before too long. The tool will add in an easy way for Windows users to activate Optical Character Recognition (OCR) via a quick screenshot interface. NeoWin spotted the changes to the PowerToys Github, with extensive documentation of the new PowerOCR tool and an apparent approval nod from a Microsoft manager. The tool is mostly the work of independent developer Joesph Finney, contributing code that works similarly to his paid Text Grab app.