2 Free Alternatives to Expensive Software

I recently bought a new computer; when I went through the options deciding what I did/didn’t want, I cut it down to the barebones. I elected not to have any software on the computer that I’d have to pay for. Below are a few terrific free alternatives to spending lots of money on software.

OpenOffice.org 3.0

Anyone who has used a computer without Microsoft Office knows that Word Pad is no alternative to Microsoft Word. OpenOffice.org’s word processor is, with most of the functionality of MS Word, it does a great job. Even down to the look and feel, it’s right on.

And it’s not just Word, the spreadsheet program is great too. I do my household budget in Excel, so I was a bit concerned that it wouldn’t work in OpenOffice, but I had no problems. You can even save to .xls for other users to open in Microsoft products. I haven’t needed to use the other applications in the suite, but I’m quite confident they’ll be great too.

Learn more at OpenOffice.org

Avast Antivirus

When I chose to deselect Norton Antivirus from my home computer build, it dropped $85 off of the final price. That’s pretty great, since Avast does just as good of a job for me.

It has great active protection, if a threat is detected it will immediately prompt you. Plus it has a toolbar attachment to Firefox / IE, if you want to use it.

Learn more about it here