by Lance Chambers

Created on: January 18, 2007   Last Updated: September 25, 2011

There are three programs that are critical to the smooth functioning of every business, large or small. And these 'must haves' can be yours for free (Macintosh and/or PC). There is also a fourth if you are into developing web pages and this one's free as well.

These are not what many of you may expect from free (often termed public domain) software. In fact the types of people who developed UNIX, one of the greatest operating systems in the world (free as well in many incarnations), are the same types of people who have developed the software I will recommend.

These programs are far more secure than anything you will get from the commercial alternatives. There are armies of dedicated people who ensure that no 'nasty' or vulnerable code creeps into these programs. You are guaranteed that these programs will do all they claim to do and do it very very well.

Web development
I used to use, for lack of a better alternative, Dreamweaver for web development. But is was very much overkill for what I wanted to do. Dreamweaver is, as far as I can tell, a very high level functional web development system for commercial developers or those responsible for large and/or lots of sites.

Given I was not a commercial web developer or responsible for a massive site I found that I used only a few of the capabilities of this wonderful piece of software. So I was paying for a wide range of functionality that I never needed - not a good commercial decision I would have thought. Well I now have an alternative that suits my needs right down to the ground.

Now I do all my web development - and there is quite a lot of it (see www.southwestcomputing/infobay/) using the first of these products - Nvu (pronounced N-view)

Download from - www.nvu.com

Office suite
I used to use Microsoft Office for all my word processing, presentation, spreadsheet and database needs - there was no viable alternative - especially not one that could, with ease, open and write Office compatible files. This need to deal with files from Office caused the biggest problems; as nearly everyone I needed to send or receive files from used the Office suite. Well OpenOffice gave me a free and very powerful alternative to spending hundreds of dollars on buying and updating the Office suite on a regular basis.

Download from - www.openoffice.org

Web browser and e-mail client
Why would I suggest these two packages since in both Windows and the Mac these two products come free anyway?

The reason is that they are simply far superior in terms of security (in comparison the Windows alternatives) and functionality (to both Windows and Mac) and Firefox (the web browser) especially has a wide array of add-ons that increase that functionality even further. The second program available from this site is Thunderbird the e-mail program.

Download from - www.mozilla.com

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