When you're looking for an app, you'll want to find the best-rated ones quickly and easily. And what better praise can a Windows app get than the ones chosen by Microsoft editors?

During the 2022 Microsoft Store App Awards, the team selected the best apps for Creativity, Entertainment, Social, and Productivity. These apps were selected based on user experience, design excellence, app quality, and customer value.

We've featured the Editor's Choice Creativity and Productivity apps here for you to explore and make your Windows experience even better.

What Are the Microsoft Store App Awards?

The Microsoft Store App Awards highlight the best entries within the tech giant's app store. Microsoft asked users around the world to send in their favorite apps, spanning a range of different categories. Once the nominees were in, the Microsoft editors picked out the winners.

As such, this article will take a closer look at all the apps that won awards for the Creativity and Productivity categories during the 2022 round of voting.

The Microsoft Store Editor's Choice Creativity Apps for Graphics and 3D

As per the Microsoft team, it was tough choosing from so many great apps for creating 2D and 3D graphics. All the finalists could have been potential winners. Finally, there was a tie between two popular apps for the top spot.

Canva: The Graphics and 3D Joint Winner

Canva Editor's Choice Creativity Graphics & 3D App

You can now enjoy creating a pitch-winning presentation, Instagram posts, greeting cards, professional-looking logos, and more with Canva on your Windows PC.

With a library of over 1 million+ premium photos and illustrations, hundreds of video templates, and 700+ font options, you'll be able to create stunning designs for your personal, social, and work needs.

Moreover, there are several hidden tools and features in Canva that will help you enhance your creations.

Download: Canva (Free, premium version available)

Paint.NET: The Graphics and 3D Joint Winner

Paint.NET Editor's Choice Creativity Graphics & 3D App

Paint.NET is a powerful yet simple app that combines a mixture of vector and photo editing tools that are adequate for most of your needs.

The intuitive and innovative user interface makes it easy for you to get started and work smoothly. You'll also enjoy the support of an active online community that provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

You can check out our guide to master Paint.NET with some handy keyboard shortcuts.

Download: Paint.NET ($7.99)

Adobe Express: Graphics and 3D Finalist

Adobe Express Editor's Choice Creativity Graphics & 3D App

You don't need to possess design skills to create stunning logos, social graphics, web pages, and video stories. You could do that in minutes with Adobe Express.

There are great templates for whatever you want to do like Instagram posts, flyers, posters, business graphics, Facebook ads, and more. Just choose one and then upload your images or search for free stock photos. Then you can try different layouts, add text, apply effects, filters, and even animations in a snap.

Download: Adobe Express (Free, premium version available)

Affinity Designer: Graphics and 3D Finalist

Affinity Designer Editor's Choice Creativity Graphics & 3D App

If you're a creative professional, you'll enjoy the power that Affinity Designer gives you to develop drawings and illustrations.

This fast and intuitive software features a Persona Panel, which lets you switch between vector and raster workspaces with a click. So you'll find it great for softening typically crisp vector art with raster textures.

Affinity Designer is built for your workflow with unlimited artboards, savable history with alternate futures, perfect color and output, and live pixel preview.

Download: Affinity Designer ($54.99)

Blender: Graphics and 3D Finalist

Blender Editor's Choice Creativity Graphics & 3D App

Blender is a free and open-source 3D creation suite.

If you're a 3D professional or run a small studio, you'll benefit from Blender's support of the entire 3D pipeline—modeling, sculpting, rigging, 3D and 2D animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, motion tracking, and video editing.

You'll find Blender as good or even better than some of the similar programs that cost a bomb. If you're a beginner, you could also check out a few simple 3D models to get started on your Blender journey.

Download: Blender (Free)

Concepts: Graphics and 3D Finalist

Concepts Editor's Choice Creativity Graphics & 3D App

Concepts offers a flexible space to sketch your ideas on its infinite canvas and write notes and doodles with realistic pencils, pens, and brushes that respond to pressure.

Whether you drawing a storyboard, creating a product sketch, or designing plans, Concepts makes it smooth and easy with its COPIC color wheel, an infinite layering system, and many more innovations.

You'll enjoy sketching and creating with this cool app that is used by professionals at Disney, Playstation, Philips, HP, Apple, Google, Unity, and Illumination Entertainment to take ideas from concept to reality.

Download: Concepts (Free, subscription available)

The Microsoft Store Editor's Choice Creativity Apps for Audio and Video

The Audio and Video category had an impressive mix of apps that enable digital storytelling, media creation, and composing your music. Here are the well-known winner and the deserving finalists.

Wondershare Filmora: The Audio and Video Winner

Wondershare Filmora Editor's Choice Creativity Audio & Video App

Undoubtedly, Wondershare Filmora is one of the best video editors that enables you to create video stories from your clips, photos, and music—easily and fast.

With this powerful app, you can unleash your imagination to make videos with a Hollywood feel, create engaging tutorials for your classmates, and record and share your game highlights.

Moreover, you can customize your videos for any social platform, from Facebook to YouTube, Instagram to TikTok.

Download: Wondershare Filmora (Free, premium version available)

djay Pro: Audio and Video Finalist

djay Pro Editor's Choice Creativity Audio and Video App

If you've ever wanted to mix tracks like a DJ you should check out djay Pro. This cool app is fun to use for both amateurs and experienced DJs and is one of the few good apps to create your music.

djay Pro gives you up to four channels of music, TIDAL, SoundCloud, and iTunes integration, silky smooth 60 frames per second interface, and offers native support for over 50 MIDI controllers by Pioneer DJ, Numark, Reloop, Denon, and others.

Download: djay Pro ($49.99)

Animotica – Movie Maker: Audio and Video Finalist

Animotica Moviemaker Editor's Choice Creativity Audio & Video App

When it comes to videos, you could do almost anything you want with the Animotica Moviemaker. This easy-to-use Video Editor, Movie Maker, and Slideshow Video Maker lets you join, split, trim, and crop video clips on your PC.

You can create standout Instagram Stories with audio, edit Zoom recordings, make Udemy lessons, share family fun, or create unforgettable memories with friends and colleagues.

Download: Animotica Moviemaker (Free, premium version available)

The Microsoft Store Editor's Choice for Productivity Apps

There would be a lot you are getting done on your Windows PC. But there are many powerful apps to do better on your work and personal fronts. The Microsoft Team chose the following apps as the best in productivity.

Liquid Text: The Productivity Winner

Liquid Text Editor's Choice Productivity App

This innovative app offers you a fast, natural way to review, gather, and organize information across all your documents. You can pull out key facts and connect them, compare document sections, draw a line to connect ideas in different documents, and much more.

You'll find it a useful and effective tool to write reports, prep for meetings, or do deep research.

Combining a cool UX with powerful features, Liquid Text may forever change how you read and annotate complex documents.

Download: Liquid Text (Free, premium version available)

Drawboard PDF: Productivity Finalist

Drawboard PDF Editor's Choice Productivity App

As per the developers, millions of engineers, architects, lawyers, students, and educators are already using Drawboard PDF every day for fast and collaborative PDF markup.

Drawboard PDF helps you mark up and annotate any PDF with the ease of pen and paper. All your favorite markup tools are available at a touch, tap, or drag, and will help you streamline your workflow.

You can also subscribe to the Pro version for advanced features and tools, like Store+Share which syncs all your and your collaborators' annotations immediately for real-time access.

Download: Drawboard PDF (Free, subscription available)

Shapr3D: Productivity Finalist

Shapr3D Editor's Choice Productivity App

Shapr3D will empower you to go from idea to 3D prototyping in minutes. This industrial-strength CAD design tool for Windows lets you transform your 3D modeling workflow and export, manufacturable models.

Shapr3D features a smart UI and is compatible with all major desktop CAD software. Moreover, you get the battle-tested Siemens geometric Parasolid modeling kernel and D-Cubed sketch engine to bring your inspirations to life.

Download: Shapr3D (Free, in-app purchases available)

Unleash Your Creativity and Enhance Your Productivity With the Best Apps

Each of the Editor's Choice apps featured above is designed to deliver an experience that is empowering yet exciting. So try them out to explore new possibilities and bring your goals to life.