Do I really need to use Microsoft Office - or will OpenOffice do just fine for desktop productivity?

Just recently, I say goodbye to Office 2003 and say hello to OpenOffice.

Consider these things:

You need to pay for Microsoft Office (and it's expensive!) while OpenOffice is free:

If you want a free organizer program on your desktop, then go with Essential Personal Information Manager or EssentialPIM or more shorter, EPIM . I use the software mostly to list my 'to do' tasks which you can order by priority. As David Allen stresses in his bestselling book Getting Things Done, listing down your tasks is the first essential step in being more organized and productive, and EPIM is a wonderful tool to do that.

While trying to install Drupal's advertisement module in this site and my other site PinoyFilm.com, I had to create banners to test the module fast and quick. I found BannerCreator to be a great free online tool to do this. One has just to enter custom values for the different fields, including free graphics(!) and voila, you can preview then download your free banner!

If you're looking for an Adobe Acrobat alternative to open your PDF (Portable Document Format) files, you should get Foxit Reader (98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003; there's also a Desktop Linux version).  Now in its 2.0 version, it's extremely light and thus loads faster than Adobe Acrobat. The paid version has the following additional features:

I really love Picasa, Google's free photo editor and organizer. The best features I like about the program is it's Basic Fixes tools like Fill Light and Redeye. With Fill Light, I can easily adjust dark pictures to literally brighten them, if for example I didn't use the flash of my Canon Powershot A530 digital camera. And then with Redeye, you just click and drag your mouse around the eye, and the red eye effect disappears.

If you want a Nero Burning Software alternative, you may want to try out CDBurnerXP Pro  for burning files -- like videos, data files, etc -- into your CD's. Although I think it's a bit slower than Nero, you're assured that your CD has no compatibility problems, which they say Nero has in XP. My own experience is that after some time, I can't read the files burned using Nero.

Recently, I recorded a song to be used for a short video and discovered that I can do it using free, and the most basic of tools. Here are the things you will need:

If you've been wondering what really BitTorrent is, and how to use it, here's a quick and dirty guide I've drawn up -- with terms defined as simply as possible -- so you can start using BitTorrent at once: