10 free tools for getting work done on your Mac

[dhilipkumar]

10 free tools for getting work done on your Mac

Word processing and office suites

Working with word processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations has long been a primary use of computers. Mac users have a range of paid options for creating and editing such documents, headed by Microsoft Office for Mac ($149 to $399, depending on the version) and Apple's iWork ($79), but there are also a number of open-source and free options.

TextEdit
The first option, for word processing only, actually comes bundled with Mac OS X. Although TextEdit is generally considered a basic text editor, it does support styled text and multiple fonts.

NeoOffice, a Mac OS X port of the open-source OpenOffice suite, is available for both Intel and PowerPC Macs. It features word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database tools that are fully interoperable with the various file formats of Microsoft's Office apps (including the Office 2007 XML formats), with the exception of Access databases.

OpenOffice
Last October, OpenOffice.org released its own Mac port of OpenOffice. Not surprisingly, OpenOffice's interface and functionality for the Mac are identical to NeoOffice in many ways.

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[dhilipkumar]

iGTD
Based on the Getting Things Done philosophy, Bartlomiej Bargiel's iGTD is a comprehensive task and project-management tool for Mac OS X. With it, you can manage projects and tasks, delegate tasks to others, tag individual tasks according to categories, and review projects and tasks in a variety of ways.

Evernote
If you need a more modest task- and information-management tool that you can access anywhere, Evernote may be your best option. This is not a project-management application. Instead, the service lets you create and organize lists of tasks and other information.

Personal finance
There are a number of personal finance applications available for the Mac at varying price points. However, the following two apps are both available for free and are decent choices for managing your personal finances and tracking how and where you spend money.

Buddi
Buddi is an open-source personal accounting tool developed by Wyatt Olson. It doesn't sport a particularly fancy interface like Quicken or other commercial tools, and its feature set is pretty light. Buddi supports basic account transactions (for cash, checking, credit cards, loans and so on) as well as overall budgeting and analysis/reports. And that's about it.

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[dhilipkumar]

Balance
If you're looking for a personal finance manager with a little bit more polish than Buddi, check out Martin Davidsson's open-source Balance. Again, its features are on the basic side, but it supports tracking of a variety of accounts and account types, displays a running tab of your net worth, and allows you to create transactions in any category you choose. It also displays an up-to-the-minute pie chart or line graph of your expenditures by category, making it easy to track where your money's going.

Running Windows
In a cross-platform world, it pays to be able to run Windows on your Mac. While you can't do this completely for free -- you'll have to shell out for a licensed copy of Windows -- you don't have to pay for the Mac software that runs Windows.

Boot Camp
Apple's Boot Camp is dual-boot software that's included with today's Intel-based Macs. Boot Camp allows users to partition their hard drives into separate Mac and Windows volumes and install Windows XP or Vista. The catch is that you can't run Mac OS X and Windows simultaneously.

VirtualBox
Virtualization software, on the other hand, allows Windows to run alongside Mac OS X as a guest OS in a virtual PC. Sun's open-source VirtualBox offers roughly the same core feature set as commercial virtualization software such as Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. Some add-on features aren't matched, but VirtualBox is a solid program that comes at no cost. Installation is also generally simple and straightforward.

Antivirus software
This last entry may not fit into some people's idea of office or productivity tools, but I'm including it because antivirus software is a must on any computer today, Mac or Windows. And let's face it, having a virus or malware on your machine can certainly keep you from getting work done.

ClamXav
While there are a number of full-featured commercial antivirus solutions available to Mac users, there is also the free ClamXav. Based on the open-source Unix ClamAV application, this tool offers solid virus-detection capabilities.

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