If you are a lover of freebies, there has never been a better time to be a computer user than now. The internet is rife with free software. It has gotten to the point that you can build a PC today and never have to pay a dime for the software that runs it. If you wanted to go the entirely free route, you would need to use a Linux flavor as your operating system. Linux is open source and is a very viable computing environment. With the increasing popularity of Ubuntu, it has also gotten to a point where Linux is not even the brain frying experience it is famous for. However, Windows remains the operating system of choice for most PC users today (some would argue whether it really is a choice, but that’s beside the point). Windows is, of course, not free. You can, however, install Windows to your computer and then put your PC to very good daily use without paying additional license fees for software.
What I am going to do with this article is briefly mention each of the major types of software you are likely to want to install on your computer. For each, I am going to list out your options for free software to achieve that goal. I am not going to do an in-depth review of any of these titles. Many of these titles are covered in past issues of Freeware Frenzy and you can look there for more in-depth coverage. Additionally, these are freebies which means you can download and try any of these with no cost to you. So, do your own review! Let’s get started:
Office Applications
Microsoft took over the operating system market with Windows, and as I said above, Windows is the big elephant in the room in terms of operating systems. Well, they have done the same with Microsoft Office. The Office suite remains the standard on Windows powered PCs for office applications. But, Office is not cheap. Are these free alternatives? Yes, there are:
- OpenOffice.Org. This is the most popular alternative to Microsoft Office and with good reason. Its an entire suite, offering Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheeting, Impress for creating presentations (the Powerpoint alternative), Draw for diagrams and 3D illustrations, Base for databases (the Access alternative) and Math for doing advanced mathematics.
- AbiWord. This is an alternative to Microsoft Word.
- ThinkFree. This is a free office suite, but it is online and used from your web browser.
- Scribus. An open source desktop publishing platform.
- Dia. Allows you to do diagramming. Not incredibly polished, but it works.
Staying Organized
Computers are a great tool for keeping your life organized, but you need some software to help you do that.
- Freemind. A free mind-mapping tool. Mind mapping is a popular tool for planning and organizing your thoughts.
- KeyNote. A very nicely programmed note-taking and personal information manager program. I don’t think it is supported any longer, but it is very stable and very useful.
- TurboCash. An open source accounting application.
- Money Manager. It isn’t Quicken, but it will manage your finances.
- Quasar. A respectable, free accounting package with similarities to Quickbooks. The title says "Linux Canada", but there is a Windows version.
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