Topic: Software – Open Source – Freeware
OpenOffice 2.0, the excellent freeware office suite is now available. It is great free software that imports Microsoft formatted documents and creates the same amazingly well.
Open Office runs on Apple, Linux, Microsoft and more operating systems and installs easily. One nice feature is that you can create pdf documents from any file (text, spreadsheet, presentation) with the click of one button. They also added a new database in release 2.0.
I’ve used the previous edition for quite some time and think it is very good; it is amazing such a product is free. More excellent freeware: Firefox and Picassa (for photos).
If I may suggest a few more excellent, free, cross-platform, open source applications:
Gimp, for image manipulation and drawing (like Photoshop);
Skencil, for creating and editing vector images (like Illustrator);
Lyx, a “what you see is what you mean” (WYSIWYM) document editor creating technical documents (basically a nice, GUI front-end for the LaTeX document formating language);
R (http://www.r-project.org), a mid- to high-end statistics package, much better than most commercial packages, and very good at creating high-quality data plots (though it has a command line interface and a steep learning curve);
maxima, for symbolic math (e.g. simplifying and solving equations analytically rather than numerically);
SciLab, a numerical computation package very much like MatLab, with a simulation environment and linear and nonlinear programming modules.
There are more, of course, but these are the ones that I have used and like. All of them have come in handy in my work, and support a data-centric decision-making process (i.e. they support PDCA).