IBM offers Free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations

A week after IBM announced that it would join the OpenOffice.org developer community, the company has launched its own standalone office application suite. Like OpenOffice.org, IBM Lotus Symphony includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, and presentation software. That shouldn't be surprising, as the software was developed using technology from the open source OpenOffice.org.

Lotus Symphony, which is currently in beta is available as a free download. This strikes yet another blow to Microsoft Office's dominance on the office space. Not only are Excel, Word, and PowerPoint facing competition from downloadable programs like OpenOffice.org and Lotus Symphony, but there's increasing pressure from online software like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Zoho.

Download Lotus Symphony here.

Free Software that I like

Free Software:

AVG free Antivirus

Windows Live Messenger

SMPlayer It's better than VLC media player and Media Player Classic. It's able to play the most known video & audio formats without the need of external codecs.

OpenOffice free office suite

GIMP GNU image manipulation program ( Like Adobe Photoshop, but Free )

Foobar2000 Great Free Media Player ( I like this better than Winamp, Itunes, and Windows Media Player )

Opera ( Probably the best Web Browser )

Firefox ( Another great Web Browser )

smartftp, the free secure FTP client for Windows

CCleaner CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool.

Linux Operating System ( Ready to dump windows? )

30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows

If that's not enough to get you started go to The Free Software Foundation ( Tons of Great Stuff Here )

Google Pack Adds StarOffice to it's lineup

Google Pack added StarOffice to it's lineup. Google Pack, the collection of applications recommended by Google, includes a new software, StarOffice, an office suite developed by Sun. In 2000 Sun released StarOffice's source code, which became the foundation of OpenOffice.org, an open source project sponsored by Sun.

StarOffice 8 is a full-featured office suite that contains a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, applications for presentations, databases, math formulas and drawing. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats (except for the formats introduced in Office 2007), but it can also export documents as PDF out of the box. The software normally costs $70, but it's available for free in Google Pack. It's worth noting that StarOffice has a huge installer ( more than 140 MB ), so you should download it only if you have a fast Internet connection.