by Ryan Budiman

Created on: January 27, 2009

When was the last time you shelled out hundreds of dollars on a single Office suite? And how many times have you reached your budget limit because of those PDF editors, design applications, and 3D games? That's all too bad, but here is one GOOD news for you: You can save more than a hundred bucks just by using the free and open-source software available on the Net. Can't believe it? Just think a while about this: One Microsoft Office Suite usually costs around $150 to $200+, but its open-source counterpart like the OpenOffice Suite or AbiWord is TOTALLY FREE to download and use. As everybody knows, most people are reluctant to move from commercial softwares simply because they don't know which alternatives to use. This short article will outline some of the popular commercial softwares and their free alternatives.

Let's begin with the most widely used office application nowadays, the Microsoft Office Suite. You may have heard that the best alternative of it is the OpenOffice Suite, and for the majority of today's computer users, this is true. Installing the suite will give you a word-processor, a presentation program, a spreadsheet application, and many more office tools.

One thing that you should bear in mind, OpenOffice is not the only alternatives available around, and if you disliked it, you might want to try AbiWord for word-processing, Gnumeric for spreadsheet program, or just use the almighty Google search engine to find free office applications. Note that some applications will only run in a certain operating system, like a Linux or a Windows only applications.

Now that you have taken care of the office suite, let's move on to the next most important application you'll need: design softwares. One most popular vendor of it is the Adobe Inc, with their well-known products such as the Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dreamweaver, and many more. Instead of buying those expensive applications bundled in one suite, you can try using Inkscape in place of Adobe Illustrator for vector drawing, and the famous GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) in exchange for Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Dreamweaver, which is used to create web pages, can be replaced by the free NVU or the Kompozer web authoring application. All the alternatives that has just been mentioned above are absolutely free, so go ahead and try each one of them.

By now you should see how easy it is to save hundreds on softwares. There are so many free applications geared to become alternatives for the commercial ones. And the best thing of all is that most of them are open-source projects, meaning that you can help in developing it. So the next time you want to buy a software, think of this: "Are there any free alternatives to it?".

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