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.

Portable apps are programs that don't have to be installed, and don't change your PC's settings.

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