Starting up a business and looking to get yourself ‘suited and booted’ with your big-brand software? Before rushing out and spending that money, you may want to have a look through the following free programs. While it may be the case that the free alternatives do not have all the features of premium products, for a large number of users who only scratch the surface of each product’s features, they should work very well. The items below are just a sample of free items out there, but hopefully they will be of use and might save you a little money.
Office suite
Writing letters, proposals and doing your books (yawn) may be your most typical activities, and are all covered by the excellent OpenOffice.org. What about compatibility with clients and other machines with Microsoft Office? Fear not, the Writer program for example allows you to save it a variety of formats including its native ODF Text Document (*.odt), but also as Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (*.doc).
PDF Creation
Looking to create PDF’s from your office documents? Bullzip.com offer a free and easy to use PDF print driver.
Mozilla offer Thunderbird as their full featured email client, which I have been using for a few years now and have found to be excellent.
Visit www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/
Calendar
Mozilla Sunbird offers a full-featured calendar application.
Visit www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird/
Graphics
GIMP (or GNU Image Manipulation Program) offers a great and free option for editing photos, working on your image files or creating artwork.
Looking for a program to handle your Vector images? Inkscape is just the thing, utilising the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
Anti-virus
AVG offer both a Free and Premium anti-virus suite, with a comparison page to weigh up the features included in each. The free version is still a very powerful tool and an alternative Firewall can be included free as shown below.
Firewall
Comodo offer a full suite, but of particular interest is the powerful Firewall application. Easy to use and install, it offers protection and provides intuitive prompts to security questions, helping you to stay protected.
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