Best Free Programs for Your Business

You are running a successful online business and you want to save capital for other expenses. Where do you make cuts? In the online business words, you can't cut costs with hosting. In fact, you'll probably spend more in the future on bandwidth. In everyday business, one will always need certain software to keep their businesses afloat. Programs like bookkeeping software, word processors, presentation and spreadsheet software are a given. Photo and video software like Photoshop and Final Cut are always in demand from designers and firms. These amazing software packages usually come at a high price. And that can make a dent on your pocketbook.

The software listed here can be downloaded on the Internet without any threat of persecution of online piracy. In fact, the publishers of these insist that you download their free software and they take pride that their free platform is available out there for public consumption.

Open Office: The king of free office software. Identical to MS Office. This is the program you download once your trial to Office is done or when your pirated registration code doesn't seem to work. I personally like using it over Office. Though the controls and the processes are a bit different, they are almost identical in user interface and design. I will admit Open Office look outdated, but it does the same things as Office without the high price.

Free RSS Readers: Yes, Google Reader is dead. But extensions for Chrome (Slick RSS) and for Firefox (Bamboo Feed Reader) are still alive and well.

GOM Video Player: Looking for a player that plays a number of different codecs? GOM Video Player is the choice for a player that plays a multitude of file types. Along with that, you will get an assortment of controls for video quality, audio quality and subtitles. It also has a companion video converter that can convert to mobile formats.

Pixlr.com: So you need photo edits on the fly? Visit Pixlr.com if you need quick resizes, text additions and changes in brightness and contrast. It has several levels of controls from "Playful" to "Efficient" to "Advanced", choose depending on your skill and your photo editing knowledge. The HTML5 powered website can access your local files for editing or you can download an image from a URL.

You can always pay the highest price for the best software packages. But ask yourself this, will you use every feature or program that software package has? Maybe you just need a word processor or an image editor for resizing. There are so many program on the Internet that serve a specific purpose. As stated, you can pay full price for the best programs. But in good business practice, you have to leverage your cost compared to usage. If you just need a simple tool for your process, they are out there and they are free.

Image credit: Anders Sandberg on Flickr

 

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