Give Yourself a Free Christmas Present

In two previous postings (Flight Simulators and Planetariums ) I mentioned several software packages that are both surprisingly functional and, being produced as part of the open source movement, have the additional attractions of being free to download and use. In today's post, I'll introduce you to a collection of software packages that will give you, again free of charge, a complete home office and personal information management suite.

OpenOffice 3.x

If you are like me, you hate having to pay a few hundred bucks every other year for Microsoft's Office suite if you can possibly avoid it. If you share my sentiments, allow me to introduce you to OpenOffice 3.x, the free alternative to Mr. Softy.

OpenOffice is an open source project that was supported by Sun Microsystems, which itself was acquired by Oracle earlier this year. Oracle has pledged its continued support for OpenOffice as well as for the popular open source project, the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment .

The one feature that sets OpenOffice apart from MS Office is that, although OpenOffice has its own file types (e.g. ".odt" for documents and ".ods" for spreadsheets), it also allows you to save your work in proprietary Microsoft Office formats such as ".doc." (A word of caution: due to possible copyright infringement issues, OpenOffice does not exactly duplicate Microsoft's file formats, but it gets closer with each upgraded release).

Every release of OpenOffice includes the following components:

Writer : a document composition tool that, as a general rule, contains all the functionality of MS Word;

Impress : very similar to MS PowerPoint;

Calc : a multifunctional spreadsheet tool;

Base : OpenOffice's version of the MS Access database program, and

Math : a tool for creating mathematical equations that can be imported as objects inside other applications (a feature that is only marginally supported in MS Office). .

You can download and install OpenOffice in a matter of minutes. Versions of OpenOffice are available for Windows, most flavors of Linux, and Apple's OSX / Snow Leopard.

Thunderbird

Since most of us have at least two, if not more, e-mail accounts (one "real" and at least one "spam magnet"), keeping track of multiple accounts can be a real problem at times.

Thunderbird is a free, open source, e-mail management client application that is supported by Mozilla.org. , the same people that give us the Firefox web browser . It works quite well with most e-mail applications (the notorious exception being Yahoo mail) and is actively supported by a large development community. See the sections "Sunbird" and "Lightning," below, for more information on the immediate plans for Thunderbird.

Thunderbird can be downloaded from this page and is available for Windows, Linux, and OSX.

Sunbird

Sunbird is (but, soon to be, was) Mozilla's answer to Microsoft's Personal Information Management applications, Outlook and Outlook Express . In that respect, it was never a serious threat to Mr. Softy's domination of the home office and data management sector because Sunbird did not include an integrated e-mail client. Mozilla will address this shortcoming with its upcoming "Lightning" addon for Thunderbird (see "Lightning," below).

According to Mozilla.org, there will be no further development related to this project. You can, of course, still download Sunbird as a stand-alone application. Visit the screenshots pages to get an idea of the many ways that Sunbird (and soon, "Lightning") can display your daily, weekly, and monthly schedules.

Lightning

As mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, until recently Mozilla did not have an application that could seriously challenge Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express. Lightning, an addon for the Thunderbird e-mail integration client, is designed to correct that shortcoming. Although currently available only in a beta version, by the time you read this post it will probably have evolved to release status.

To summarize, in this and in the two previous posts, I've mentioned several sophisticated applications that are currently available for your personal computer at absolutely no cost to you. There are, of course, many other applications that are available under the open source banner that were not discussed. I encourage you to support the open source movement and to help keep Internet information free for everyone.