Free Alternatives to Costly Software

Relatively few people know about free alternatives to some of the most popular (and costly) software packages. Whether you're looking for word processing, website building or even photo editing, there are free software programs waiting to be found with absolutely no cost and no strings attached. Best of all, these programs are often equal or superior in quality to the popular name brands. You just have to know where to find them.

Looking for office productivity software that won't break the bank? Consider downloading Open Office, an open-source office suite available absolutely free from openoffice.org. Open Office offers a word processing program similar to Microsoft Word®, a spreadsheet application similar to Microsoft Excel®, a presentation application similar to Microsoft Powerpoint®, and a drawing/vector graphics editor. Files created using Open Office products are compatible with the respective Microsoft Office® programs and many others, which means that if you created a document in Mircosoft Word® it can be opened and edited in OpenOffice Write. Likewise, a document created in Write can be saved in the Word® .doc format and opened by Word® users.

For those who are new or novice in the area of web design and looking for an alternative to the awkward web building tools provided by the hosting company or the commercially available software, there is another choice. Nvu is an open-source WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get - which means it's graphic instead of writing code) web authoring application similar to Microsoft Frontpage® or Macromedia Dreamweaver®. You don't have to know how to write HTML or CSS to use Nvu, so it's a great choice for beginners or intermediate users. Nvu is available absolutely free at nvudev.com.