Directive Blogs
5 Free Software Picks
Sometimes the best things in life are free, and software is no exception (who doesn't love FREE?). Surprisingly, free applications can rival the more expensive commercial apps that offer similar features. We aren't necessarily saying these apps are ready for businesses to use, but for a home user who doesn't want to purchase expensive commercial software, free is the way to go.
Lotus Symphony
Lotus Symphony is a feature-rich suite of productivity tools that rivals the standards of Microsoft Office. Document Publishing, Spreadsheets, and Presentations are similar to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. What's neat is you can take your standard Microsoft Office files and open them up with Lotus Symphony. Lotus is based on another popular free app called OpenOffice, but Lotus offers a slicker interface that feels more like a modern commercial app.Â
Evernote
While we're talking about productivity apps, if you are a fan of Microsoft OneNote, you'll feel right at home with Evernote. The Evernote application is free, and makes it easy for you to take and organize notes, photos, voice memos, images, links, you name it. While OneNote has a whole slew of features for searching notes, collaborating, publishing, and more, Evernote takes the primary functionality and goes one step further and lets you sync your notes between multiple computers and devices easily. Sync notes between your desktop, laptop, Android/iPhone, and always have them with you. The free version lets you sync up to 60MB per month (which is a lot if you don't use it often for pictures and audio) but you can upgrade to a premium account for $45 a year that grants you an entire 1GB per month.
Keepass
KeePass is a free, open source password manager that has been around for many years. There are commercial password management systems that offer more features but KeePass is simple to use, lightweight, and secure. You can even sync your encrypted database with a service like Dropbox so you can access it from anywhere, including the KeePass Android or iPhone App. If you have accounts all over the internet for social networks, online stores, email accounts, and more, you should be using a different password for each, and with KeePass, you can keep them all in one place.
Digsby
Digsby lets you manage all of your instant messengers, email accounts, and social networks in one lightweight application. If you use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, or Jabber, you can connect to them all at once with Digsby. You can also get email notifications and connect to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. There have been plenty of apps that do this over the past decade, but Digsby does it very well and lets you synchronize your settings between multiple computers, a feature that you normally need to pay for with a multi-protocol IM client.
VLC Media Player
If you use your desktop or laptop to watch videos and DVDs, you've probably noticed that sometimes the software you have simply won't play all of your files. Some DVDs might refuse to play and certain media files will pop up a message like "Missing codec." Enter VLC, a free, open source media player that works on most operating systems. VLC claims to play everything and you don't need to hunt down video codecs just to get the file to play. VLC also works as a great, lightweight DVD application.
Popular commercial software typically has at least one free variation out there. The real question is can the free application work for your organization. Sometimes the features or support of commercial software outweight the price. Looking for consulting for choosing the right productivity software for your business? Feel free to call us at 607.433.2200.
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