Eight Free Programs You’ll Use All the Time

There are times when you have to shell out for premium software. For example, recently we discussed how useful InDesign has been to us, worth its hefty $700-per-user price tag.

But increasingly you can find a free version of whatever you need. Here are a few we use all the time.

• Firefox (Mozilla’s Web browser) and Thunderbird (their e-mail client). While it’s true that Microsoft Explorer and Outlook Express are free, Mozilla’s open-source development means there’s a whole world of developers out there constantly creating new add-on improvements that you can add or not, as you choose.
• OpenOffice. Replaces Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. I already had Word and Excel on my computer when I found out about this, but I use the PowerPoint replacement all the time.
• Pidgin. We do a lot of instant messaging when documents start flying around near deadline. Pidgin lets you use multiple IM accounts (Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo) at once.
• Switch. When we cover meetings, often we have to compress digital recordings from a bulky .wav file to a more easily uploaded mp3. Switch handles those conversions.
• FileZilla. Then, when the mp3 is ready, we upload it to our FTP site using FileZilla.
• Avast!. Free antivirus software with free virus database updates.
• PDF Creator. This one we don’t use every day. But it is useful in this type of situation: I’ve e-mailed a document to a client, and on her computer the table of contents keeps getting strange formatting errors. I could track down the source of the problem but that would take some time, and she doesn’t want to manipulate the table, just read it. PDF Creator lets me send the image of the document exactly as it appears on my screen.