Must-have free softwares for Windows

To write in Latex: TexnicCenter and MikTex
To do graphics: Gimp and Inkscape
To do spreadsheets: Gnumeric
To do plain or code editing: Notepad++

SketchUp - Free 3D Drawing Tool

Dabbleboard - an online drawing tool...

Link - Dabbleboard.com

Free OpenOffice.org to replace Microsoft Office

If you don't have Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc), download OpenOffice.org applications. They're free and they're open-source, meaning that they'll always be upgraded and improved all the time.


The OpenOffice.org, aka OOO, applications that work similar to Microsoft Office applications. These are some of their apps:

• Writer - works like Microsoft Word
• Calc - works like Excel
• Impress - does presentation similar to PowePoint
• Draw - does sketches, graphics, flowcharts, diagrams, etc...
• Base - to handle and manipulate database

See more details about their apps here.

Zotero - free bibliographic software for citation

Zotero is simply awesome. It's a free open-source bibliographic software. That means you use it to create citations automatically in your report, thesis, paper, etc. The best thing about Zotero is it works inside Firefox and it automatically senses whether a webpage has any bibliographic informations in it. You can then easily save citations into Zotero that runs inside Firefox without opening any other applications. It also has thousands of bibliographic styles.


You only need 3 things to use Zotero.

1. You need to download the free Firefox browser and use it as your browser. If you're using some other browsers such as Internet Explorer, don't worry. Firefox is the best, so forget Internet Explorer.
2. Then you need to install Zotero as a Firefox extension. Zotero software works inside Firefox, so that's great, because you don't it to open multiple applications to browse the web and to save/create citations.
3. Then you have to install a small Zotero plugin to make Microsoft Word knows that Zotero exists so that it can automatically get citations from Zotero.

That's all you have to do. Check it out from Zotero for more details.