Best Free Office Tools4.552

BEST FREE FONT VIEWER

AMP Font Viewer – Font manager, view, install, uninstall, organize your fonts. an interesting feature is that you can “test” fonts before deciding to install them.

Alternatives: - FontPicker, Fast Font Preview, NexusFont2

BEST FREE MOVIE CATALOGING SOFTWARE

Personal Video Database – Simply the best movie collection manager. It can retrieve information about your movies from several internet databases, includes loan manager and full unicode support. And it has a nice layout too.

Alternatives: Ant Movie Catalog

BEST FREE FONT FINDER

FontNetInstaller – This one can help you search for fonts over the internet as it has the best websites indexed and lets you search through them within the program. Doesn’t require installation, just unpack and run.

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BEST FREE TEXT EDITOR

Notepad++ – Powerful open source text editor written in C++, supports a wide range of programming languages, great multi-document and multi-view features.

Alternatives: - Emerald Editor, PsPad

BEST FREE OFFICE SUITE

OpenOffice.org – This open source package replaces my Microsoft Office installation. Is it as good? I think it’s better! You won’t have any problems with adjusting to it, the basic features are similar to those in Microsoft Office.

Alternatives: IBM Lotus Symphony, Oxygen Office, Jarte (word processor only)

BEST FREE PDF READER

PDF XChange Viewer – Very good PDF reader, a lot faster than Adobe Reader. And there’s even more: you can convert your PDF files to various file formats, including BMP, JPG, PNG or TIFF. It can be integrated with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Alternatives: - Foxit Reader, Sumatra PDF

BEST FREE PDF WRITER

PDFCreator – Very good freeware PDF writer, can create PDF files out of any printable document. It can be installed as standalone or as a server application – install on a single computer and have it available on all the machines in your network.

Alternatives: BullZip, CutePDF

BEST FREE DVD BURNER

StarBurn – I’ve been using Nero before. I don’t need it anymore, StarBurn is free and pretty good. I’ve burned several DVDs with it (including DVD video) and it never failed. Supports CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs.

Alternatives: CD Burner XP, ImageBurn, InfraRecorder

BEST FREE FILE COMPRESSION PROGRAM / ZIP UTILITY

IZArc - Very good free archive utility, works with almost any archive file format and it also converts various CD image file formats to ISO.

Alternatives: PeaZip, jZip, 7zip, TUGZip

BEST FREE DICTIONARY

WordWeb – Great free dictionary and thesaurus, I’m already in love with it. It can be used to look up words from almost any program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. It includes pronunciations and usage examples, has spelling and sounds-like links.

Alternatives: - Lingoes, The Sage

BEST FREE ACCOUNTING PROGRAM

GnuCash – Powerful open source accounting program, suitable for both common and advanced users.

Alternatives: - AceMoney Lite

BEST FREE WEATHER INFORMATION PROGRAM

Weather Watcher – Fast, lightweight, reliable. I don’t know if you could ask for more.

Alternatives: Weather Pulse

BEST FREE LYRICS FINDER

Evil Lyrics – Automatically searches for lyrics as your song is played in your player, it works great with Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes, MusicMatch, Foobar, MediaMonkey, Real Player, QCD, AlbumPlayer, Y!Music, XMPlay. It even has a karaoke mode.

Alternatives: - AutoLyrix

BEST FREE STICKY NOTES PROGRAM

Stickies – Once you get used to it you won’t be able to live without it. Easily creates sticky notes on your desktop.

Alternatives: - StickyPad

BEST FREE TO DO LIST MANAGER

Task Coach – Open source, multi platform, you can easily create and manage “to do” lists and monitor your tasks.

Alternatives: - Project Timer

BEST FREE UNIT CONVERTER

Free Unit Converter - Easy to use but very powerful unit converter, supports over 5000 units of measure.

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BEST FREE CURRENCY CONVERTER

EuroConvertor - Free, easy to use, updates the currency rates every time you start the program.

BEST FREE DVD COVER PRINTER

UnderCoverXP – Tiny program that can help you to make and print DVD covers and labels using various templates.

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BEST FREE OCR (Optical Character Recognition) PROGRAM

SimpleOCR – Powerful and easy to use freeware program that can handle machine writing and hand writing and that can be used directly with your scanner.

BEST FREE CD/DVD EMULATOR

WinCDEmu – Very easy to use open source program, you can mount and unmount disk  image files by double-clicking them in Windows Explorer.

Alternatives: – Total Mounter, Gizmo Drive

MISCELLANEOUS FREE OFFICE PROGRAMS

LangOver – Tiny freeware utility that can convert your written text quickly between languages. If you forgot to press alt + shift to change the keyboard layout you just have to press a key and your text is automatically converted to the new language.

TinySpell – Free spellchecker for Windows, tiny but powerful.