This Weeks Marketing Tip – Be thrifty when you can be!
By Garrett Dann
These are the kinds of days where every penny counts. Why
spend money on software if you don’t have to? I am a fan of
finding and using good quality software tools that I don’t have
to pay for.
I have quite a list of them.
So I thought I’d briefly let you know about what I consider to
be some of the more important ones to me – and I think they
will be to you also.
Mind you, I’m not making any money out any of these links.
OK first off – OpenOffice.org is an excellent office tools
package everyone should have a copy of. In many cases it is
even better than Microsoft Office. For one, the PDF file
format is directly supported without any plugins or printer
drivers.
It also uses an intuitive menu system, a bit like MS Office
used to have before they introduced their “ribbon bar” that
takes up a lot of the valuable screen.
It will also import and export MS Office documents, so
you’ll still be use other people’s WORD files.
==> http://www.openoffice.org/
For web browsing, I prefer Firefox for its speed, flexibility,
and excellent security features:
==> http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html
With respect to PDF files, if I’m not using OpenOffice.org,
I produce them using either Cute PDF or PrimoPDF. Both
of these “look” like printers to any Windows program that
can use printers but instead of actually printing a document
they save it to a file in the new PDF format. They’re both
very easy to use and can be picked up right here:
==> http://www.cutepdf.com/
==> http://www.primopdf.com/
For web page editing I use KompoZer available from their
site at kompozer.net. It is a bug-fixed edition of NVU (N-view).
It is a WYSIWYG website editor and it’s unbelievably
sophisticated for a f.ree piece of software. I like it! You’ll
love it – get it here:
For graphics editing I use PhotoShop and Paint Shop Pro
but I recently cam across a program called GIMP. I think
Gimp can do just about anything I normally do with my
programs (which are fairly expensive) and it’s completely
fre.e. It’s not the easiest of tools to get used to (easier than
Photoshop and PaintShop were) but, once you know it,
it’s very powerful – grab it for yourself right here:
When I produce videos that demonstrate my products,
I found Windows Media Encoder here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/forpros/encoder/default.mspx
How did I find out about all of these tools??
It’s simple.
Besides doing the obvious searches, I usually check for
“open source xxx,” where xxx is the type of product
(i.e. DVD player or WYSIWYG Editor etc…).
If the tool exists, most of the time, this will find it for you;
and you can usually find one of fairly very high quality.
The reason for that is that there are plenty of software
engineers out there who give their time regularly to improve
packages for their own purposes. After this they donate
their source code for the item to the community.
If the source code is available, others can try to improve
the programs. That’s how many of the above programs
came to exist in the first place!
…and more come along every day.
Hope you enjoy playing with and getting to know the
capabilities of all your new software, please remember who
was thinking of you and brought it to you today.
Take care for now, talk to you soon,
Garrett 
)
PS – You Can Find More Neet G-Tips On My Blog:
==> http://garrettdann.com/MarketingTacticsBlog/
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