Office & Productivity Software

September 21st, 2008 by Tom

Best Free And Open Source Software

Already for a while I’m thinking about presenting a series of posts containing software that I’ve come to think of as being the best free and open-source ones around at the moment.

I know that there’s often a lot of alternative solutions, not necessarily worse than the ones I suggest here, but I’ll try to limit myself to one main title for every need. I have these applications installed and use most of them very often.

In this article I want to list my favorite productivity and office-related applications:

Foxit Reader: free PDF document viewer, with incredible small size, breezing-fast launch speed and rich feature set. I’m especially surprised about the huge launch speed difference with Adobe Reader. I always felt opening a PDF file was cumbersome before, because it meant staring at a splash screen for several seconds. But times have changed for me: with this application you’re looking at the file almost instantly!

GnuCash: open-source personal and small-business financial-accounting software. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. It has capabilities similar to Quicken and more.

OpenOffice.org: open-source office suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is a collection of applications that work together closely to provide the features expected from a modern office suite. Many of the components are designed to mirror those available in Microsoft Office. Check out the article I wrote earlier about this it as well.

PDFCreator: open-source tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application that is able to print. It installs itself as a virtual printer under Windows. To create a PDF file, just select this printer called PDFCreator and print to it. But instead of a printed sheet of paper rolling out somewhere, you’ll then get a dialog with details to save the newly created PDF file on disk instead.

PDFTK Builder: PDFTK Builder is a free (open source) graphical interface to the Windows version of PDFTK making it much easier to use. It allows you to collate, i.e. rearrange (reorder, delete & duplicate) pages in a single document and/or merge pages from multiple PDF documents, split documents, rotate pages, set passwords (and rights) as well as adding a watermark.

Rainlendar: a free feature rich calendar application that is easy to use and doesn’t take much space on your desktop. All the future events are shown in a separate list where you can see the week’s events at one glance. You can also have a separate list for your long term tasks. The appearance can be customized with skins. It’s worth to go and check out the website for a complete list of features.