Absolutely Free Software -
Best Windows Office Freeware

No shareware, no nagware, no adware. Reviewed constantly. Categorized conveniently.

This page is updated regularly. Last update: October 17, 2005.

Free Office Applications

Free Full Office Suite

OpenOffice OpenOffice

A complete suite of office applications that mirrors Microsoft's, including a word processor, a spreadsheet application, a presentation maker (think PowerPoint), a database creator (like Access), and even drawing and equation applications. OpenOffice is one of the crown jewels of free software, with pretty much all the bells and whistles that you would want in an office suite. You can even create PDF files from any of the applications, something Microsoft can't do. Additionally, you can open and save to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. Absolutely amazing.

This is the one to watch, and could, ultimately, be the Microsoft killer. Most businesses are tied to Windows purely because they can't afford to give up MS Office. OpenOffice runs on Linux, OSX, as well as Windows, and it does everything that the vast majority of businesses need. It's rapidly being adopted worldwide by governments and school systems. For example, Brazil is in the process of fully adopting it in all government offices.

http://OpenOffice.org

Free Word Processor Only

AbiWord AbiWord

updated 10/17

As of version 2.4, AbiWord now has a grammar checker! Even OpenOffice doesn't have this. Yet.

As impressive as OpenOffice is, you may rather have just a word processor. If you never use spreadsheets or make presentations, why bog your computer down with software you don't need? AbiWord is the best of the free word processors. It starts up very fast, and uses very little hard drive space and memory.

http://www.abisource.com/

Free PDF Viewer

Adobe Reader Adobe Reader

Yes, I'm well aware of alternative PDF viewers such as Foxit PDF Reader and GSview. Sorry, they're just not as good. Adobe Reader is the best It's so good, in fact, that you already have it installed. Just make sure you have the latest version. (I'm listing it here because of all the email I get about the other readers.)

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=10&platform=Windows

Free PDF Creator / PDF Converter

PDF Creator PDF Creator

PrimoPDF PrimoPDF

I consider the ability to create pdf's a "must". For good or evil, pdf is the standard format for universal accessibility. Adobe Reader is ubiquitous, and pdf's are viewable on all computer platforms. OpenOffice allows you to create pdf files within that program, but PDF Creator allows you create pdf files from any program. For ease of install and use, PDF Creator can't be beat. It's Open Source as well.

new! added August 25, 2005- I almost did not include PrimoPDF for a couple of reasons. 1. It's commercial freeware, and doesn't use the GNU public license. 2. It's advertised "encryption" features did not work correctly on two test machines. When I attempted to add password protection to disallow printing, copying, comments, or ability to change the document, PrimoPDF created an unreadable PDF.

I only finally decided to include it because, frankly, it's quite a bit faster that PDF Creator, and it's GUI is cleaner.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796&package_id=53473

http://www.primopdf.com/

Free Calendar / Personal Information Manager (PIM)

Palm Desktop Palm Desktop Software

Rainlendar Rainlendar

updated August 23, 2005

"But I don't have a Palm PDA!" you utter in blissful ignorance. Ah, my child, let me tell you a secret. Palm has been giving their desktop software away for years. True, it integrates with their handheld device, but, you see, it doesn't have to. It functions perfectly well as a standalone application, and because of Palm's ubiquity, the format can be easily meshed with other applications such as Yahoo Calendar.

new! 8/23 Rainlendar is horse of a different color, a translucent horse. Far, far smaller than Palm Desktop and snappier and prettier as well. A few things are in its favor: iCal support (if you don't know what that means, you don't need it), Windows transparency, client synchronization. It does not handle contact information, but it does include to-do lists. For a lightweight alternative, its a nice choice.

http://www.palm.com/us/software/desktop/

http://www.ipi.fi/~rainy/index.php

Free Note Taker / Information Manager

EverNote EverNote

new! Updated August 16, 2005

I work at a computer a lot. For years, I always kept some type of text editor open at all times to type and copy notes as needed. Phone numbers, scraps of code, internet urls, I would type in anything that came up throughout the day. At the end of the day I would go through the notes and save what I needed. This worked, but not perfectly. It was often difficult to find old notes, and it would be nice to be able to paste pictures or format the text.

Enter note-taking applications.

Note-taking applications let you take notes through the clipboard, drag-and-drop, typing, or even handwriting (for tablet PC's). They collect web pages and pictures, and, very importantly, allow you to easily find your notes through date, category or rapid search. You don't have to save any files, that's done automatically.

A couple years ago, Microsoft came out with a program called OneNote that did all these things, and I loved it. After using for quite some time, I became slightly disillusioned because it was a little sluggish. Taking a quick note should be, well, quick. Even though I had it running as a quick launch application, it still took a few seconds to load up. That was irritating. I also would have liked a way to store sensitive information without being afraid that it could be seen by someone else.

EverNote solves these problems. It's fast, fast, fast. It supports encryption on a per-note basis. I vastly prefer its interface. It even has templates for such things as shopping lists and contacts. I cannot recommend it enough. If you need this type of application, this is the one to get.

http://www.evernote.com/

Free Outliner / Note Taker

KeyNote KeyNote

KeyNote shares some functionality with EverNote, but isn't as robust. It doesn't store images or clip web pages for example. It does, though, provide an excellent outliner for text-only notes. For keeping lists, or text snippets with built-in encryption, this is a fine alternative.

http://www.tranglos.com/free/

Free Spell Checker

TinySpell  TinySpell

new! Updated August 16, 2005

Don't want to fire up your word processor just to spell-check a word? TinySpell will check your spelling in any application. A system tray icon will turn yellow if a word is misspelled, and will give you the option of correcting it. You can also add words to the dictionary. There are a handful of utilities out there that do the same thing, and none really stand out significantly. I like TinySpell's small size and ease-of use.

http://tinyspell.m6.net/

Free Dictionary / Thesaurus

  WordWeb

new! Updated August 16, 2005

Significantly better than any on-line dictionary or thesaurus. WordWeb has some of the following features.

It will look up words from most programs, including OpenOffice (yay!) or Word (ugh).

http://wordweb.info/free

Free Sticky Notes

hott notes hott notes

new! updated September 14, 2005

We finally have a worthy successor to ATnotes, which is no longer being developed. This program supports checklist notes, alarms, the ability to save as text, global hotkeys, and infinite flexibility to customize colors, fonts, etc. Nice job.

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jcriley/hottnotes/index.html

Free OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

SimpleOCR SimpleOCR

new! added August 30, 2005

So you got that spiffy new scanner for $25 (after rebate) at your local Humongo Electronics Store. You want to save your old Social Studies papers. Scan 'em in and run them through OCR. Then you can edit them and post them on your blog.

SimpleOCR is aptly named. It doesn't have tons of unnecessary "features" that you find in most commercial OCR packages. You can process scanned pages or pre-existing images and save them to a simple text file or save them as a Word document if you prefer. Clean and quick.

http://www.simpleocr.com/