Liberty's Blog

Some of my favorite programs are free. I use and find Calc98 a requirement for any computer I use. Great for every day calculations and conversions. It is more sophisticated than I will ever be. It will convert just about Unit to just about anything Whether its Scientific or Engineering. It does a great job of keeping the the decimal multipliers to units divisible by 3 such as 12.6555E-6, or 724.98E12 so it is user friendly when dealing with mega, micro and Kilo prefixes. It even works on WindowsCE PDA's and cellphones.

Another essential program that I use every day is IrfanView. Most folks have an image viewer in their system, but IrfanView is different. Its a small fast loading program, and it allows quick resizing, It actually seems to do a more accurate job of resizing than Photoshop. And if course it is faster. Now this isn't a a full featured image editor, but it sure does a good job of basic viewing, and scanner interfacing. It does what it does well and the cost (free) is very hard to beat.

Another set of programs that I find I'm using more and more is the OpenOffice.org Suite. I have Windows Office both here and at work, I also have Open Office here at work and on my thumbdrive. It works and works well. Seems as though lately I'm drifting more and more to it. Now I'm not a poweruser, but it seems as though it does anything that the big expensive Msoft office does. But As I get more familiar with it Open Office just seems more intuitive. Today I upgraded my home installation from 2.02 to 2.3.0. While there are some functional changes that I haven't used yet. Graphing in Calc ,the spreadsheet program, is supposed to be improved., I thought it worked pretty decent in the old version. Then again my demands aren't that difficult. What I did notice during the upgrade process was that there was a lot more help and documentation to be found. Much of it can be found referenced from openOffice.org pages, and also in Wiki I have found it much easier to find help and figure out how to make things work for Open Office than for Office programs. Its about the community, and the Open office community is determined to make it work and support abounds. But perhaps the neatest thing is extentions. Extensions allow for customizing the programs to fit ones needs. Some of these might be simple Templates, other may be much more complex. Most are free. Others seem reasonably priced This article is posted using the WebLog Extension time will tell if its worth the 10 bucks.