PIXELS

Most of you will have already heard of Photoshop. It's the professional standard for photo and image manipulation. If you create/maintain a website, have a digital camera, or dabble in graphic design for your weekly bulletins you've no doubt already looked into purchasing this fantastic piece of software.

Unfortunately, it costs $900.00. That's where The Gimp Shop comes in.

The Gimp Shop is a hack of the open source project named "The Gimp" - a Photoshop-like software package. One of The Gimp's major criticisms is it's un-friendly user interface. The Gimp Shop hack attempts to make the interface more like Photoshop. The hack is so successful that you should have little trouble following online tutorials for Photoshop from within The Gimp Shop.

You can grab The Gimp here.

Or. You can grab the Gimp Shop here.

The Gimp Shop is available for all major operating systems.

VIRUS

I don't need to tell you how significant a problem viruses can be on your home computer. The problem is even more severe on a computer that may contain sensitive data concerning your congregants.

For a while, Norton Anti-Virus was the best option for keeping your computer safe and virus free. Unforuntately, over the years it has become bloated and can really slow down your computer.

Thankfully, there are several free anti-virus solutions. One of my favourites is AVG Anti-Virus Free by Grisoft. AVG features a terrific easy-to-use interface, a small memory footprint (for speedy operation), scheduled and manual virus scanning, and it's even Windows Vista ready!

There is also a commercial upgrade that will also take care of your spyware protection, and firewall needs. But, for most users, the free version should be sufficient.

You can find AVG Anti-Virus Free here .

AVG Anti Virus Free is available for Windows and Linux.

PDFs

The PDF file format is terrific. It's compact, secure, and can be read by the majority of computer users. Adobe Acrobat takes care of all your PDF creation needs. It's an incredibly powerful tool. But, for most users it's just way too powerful. Spending almost $400.00 for a software package and only using about 10% of the functionality seems like a waste of money.

So, for those of you that only need the PDF output abilities of a package like Acrobat, there's the open source project PDFCreator.

PDFCreator installs in your machine just as a printer would. PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. So... if you can print it, you can also make a PDF of it.

You can find the PDFCreator homepage here .

PDFCreator is available for windows.

OFFICE SUITE

Microsoft Office 2007 can cost up to $600.00. Granted, for most churches this piece of software will be used every working day of the year. But, wouldn't it be great if there was a free alternative to the MS Office Suite?

There is! (I bet you didn't see that coming).

The Open Office software package consists of 7 fully-functional programs.

Writer - A WYSIWYG word processor similar to MS Word. It can even open and save Microsoft .DOC files.

Calc - A spreadsheet program similar to Excel. Again, it can open and close Microsoft Excel files.

Impress - A powerpoint-like program! Impress can open PowerPoint files.

Base - A program similar to MS Access.

Draw - A vector graphics editor similar to CorelDraw for creating complex clipart.

Math - A program similar to MS Equation Editor.

Quickstarter - A program that runs when your operating system first boots that ties together all of the separate programs and loads shared program libraries for quick access.

These are not watered down versions of the MS equivalents! These are incredibly mature packages that will leave you wondering why you never thought to explore an office suite alternative earlier!

You can find the OpenOffice homepage here .

OpenOffice is currently available for all major operating systems.

That's it for now! I plan on making this a regular feature in the GenEvange blog, so, please check back regularly for more great software tips! If you have any suggestions for future entries please send me an email!

David Pritchett
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