Great Free Programs for Your Craft Business
Your computer vendor would like you to believe you need to buy every single piece of software for your business to work well. Now, with all the great free and open source options out there, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, this article was typed out with Open Office, and published on a modified WordPress blog, both open source. Here are a few pieces of software that may come in handy, and that won’t cost a penny.
Open Office(http://www.openoffice.org)
A full office suite containing, among others, a word processor and a spreadsheet software. Great stuff. Also, if you sell patterns or any other digital products (eBooks), you can simply go in File/Export to PDF to get a PDF version of your work. That function alone (and yes, it can read Word docs), makes it worth getting.
GIMP (http://www.gimp.org)
A nice image manipulation software, miles and miles ahead of what you could get with MS Paint. If you need to create a logo or a banner, it’s a great option. The only flaw is that it was first created for Linux, so it still have some Linux philosophy that may make it a bit strange at start for Windows users.
Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net)
A great free graphics program with all the bells and whistles most of us would ever need. As a Windows user, I find this program much easier and user-friendly than GIMP and highly recommend it.
NVU (http://www.nvu.com)
Want a visual tool to edit your webpage? NVU is a complete program to create your own webpages easily, without having to pay for Frontpage or Dreamweaver. Or maybe you’re like me and you’re still using Notepad. Arrr.
HTML-Kit (http://www.html-kit.com)
Another fantastic free HTML editor that I use and can recommend. It also has hundreds of free plugins that can expand its features greatly. Worth checking out.
PDF995 Printer Driver (http://www.pdf995.com/download.html)
PDF995 will install as a printer on your computer. After, just print from any program as usual, and choose that printer, and you’ll get a PDF file instead of a printed document. Great for all those programs that don’t support PDF yet, or for a quick and dirty PDF to show around.
WordPress (http://www.wordpress.org/ or Fantastico in cPanel if you have a Unix host)
Ok, it’s a script meant for a web page, not software, but since I named it in the introduction… WordPress is the best blogging platform if you have your own web hosting. There are tons of free templates and plugins out there. It’s also easy customize it to your taste if you know some web design skills (or know someone who do) and with the huge customer base, it’s easy to get support.
To find hundreds of more great and useful freeware software programs, I suggest going to Snapfiles.
Suggested Reading:
Pro Techniques for Home Studio Recording - Tips Tricks and Techniques for Pro Tools and other DAW users (Recording Guide)Let's face it, the "big" recording studio is dead. The power and music production potential contained in the laptop I'm typing on is probably about eq... Read More >
Related Posts
