Born Free

Some brilliant business tools that come gratis.


Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamare dil mein hai
Dekhna hai zor kitna bazu-e-qatil mein ha…
I must be really dull. It has taken me 42 winters of living in free India and a movie called Rang De Basanti to get a grip on the meaning of these words by Ramprasad Bismil. Freedom, the most valuable thing in my life may have come to me free, but unfortunately the best software doesn't. So my eternal quest of unearthing outstanding free programs that lurk across the Internet continues. Here are some of finest business tools I have discovered.


OpenOffice
An application suite comprising a word processor, database manager, spreadsheet proggie, presentation manager, mathematical equation solver, drawing programme and mail merge. It has the jigar and the dum to taken on the might of Big Daddy MS Office. It’s available in 27 languages (including Hindi, Tamil and Bengali). It’s as stable as a 10-legged table. And it’s legal. Despite being free. Because it’s an open-source product and project. And ya, Google is also backing its development too. By default OpenOffice saves files in the open-standard OASIS OpenDocument XML format (for compatibility with other apps), but you can open and save documents in MS Office, PDF, HTML etc. formats as well. Unlike Office, this suite was not assembled by knitting separate programmes together. It was designed as a complete package from ground up. Hence, it provides neater integration.
Requires: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP, Java Runtime Environment 1.4
File size: 76.34MB
www.openoffice.org

AceMoney Lite
AceMoney Lite is free account-management app meant for home and small-business finances. It let’s you track your spending habits, create and manage budgets, track stocks and investments, use online banking, track bill payments, do your financial math in multiple currencies, download the latest exchange rates from the Internet, plan loans and debts and do some e-business as well. It has 100 pre-defined transaction categories, supports password protection, 150 currencies, and more than 20 languages. AceMoney Lite can also generate custom reports, bar graphs and pie charts, and has a simple loan calculator.
Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
File size: 1.38MB
www.mechcad.net/products/acemoney/index_lite.shtml


Ultra Hal Text-to-Speech Reader
Reading long documents onscreen is a difficult task. You always tend to skip words/lines/paras. Ever tried using a text-to-speech tool to read the text aloud for you? It can be amazingly fast and quite faultless (if you can concentrate on listening). And Zabaware’s Ultra Hal is reliable tool for this task. Apart from TXT and RTF files, you can use it for reading out e-books, Clipboard content, Windows dialogs and instant messages. It can be a wonderful aid for the visually impaired. Ultra Hal verbalises in 20 voices. You can tweak pronunciation to a degree and tune reading speed as well as voice pitch. The app utilises Microsoft text-to-speech engines. It let’s you save the output as a WAV file. MP3 mangta? You’ll need separate converter for that. Haan, don’t try your maatra bhasha in it (unless you want to have fun with gora log kae accents!)
Requires: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server
File size: 11.52MB
www.zabaware.com/download.asp

Like most of us, all this stuff was born free. So enjoy it. Yet, pause awhile to articulate with me this rendition of Sarfaroshi from Rang De Basanti:
Hai liye hathiyaar dushman taak mein baitha udhar,
Aur hum taiyyaar hain seena liye apna idhar.
Khoon se khelenge Holi agar vatan muskhil mein hai,
Sarfaroshi ki tamanna ab hamaare dil mein hai...