Software is what makes a computer useful. The variety of software available today is vast, but it takes only a couple programs to make a computer indispensable and even fun to use. In this article, we look at some of the software you might want to install on your own system.
Office Applications Software
A full office application suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation, and personal information management applications, may be more than the average home user needs or wants. A basic word processor and perhaps a spreadsheet and presentation program are often included in home or student versions of an office suite.
Microsoft Office comes in several different versions, including a monthly subscription plan called Office 365, allowing you to purchase just the applications you actually need. For the Mac, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are built-in apps. Nevertheless, commercial software can be expensive. There are many free or low-cost alternatives if you’re willing to spend some time finding them and learning how to use them. These alternative programs have the ability to save files in common file formats so you can move your work between to programs and across platforms.
Apache OpenOffice is a free, open source alternative office suite available in Windows, Mac, and Linux versions. Open source means that the source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute it without paying a fee. Some open source websites, such as Apache OpenOffice, ask for donations to support the development of the product. Apache OpenOffice contains word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, database, and formula writer applications. It can identify, open and work with documents created in other programs, such as Microsoft Office, and can save files in its own format or common formats such as Microsoft Word or Rich Text Format so you can work with your files in other programs and across platforms. Figure 1 shows the welcome screen of Apache OpenOffice.
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| Figure 1 Apache OpenOffice Welcome Screen |
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| Figure 2 Google Drive Spreadsheet |
Microsoft Office Online includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. The free web apps are not fullfeatured versions. Figure 3 shows a PowerPoint presentation being edited using the Office Online version.
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| Figure 3 Microsoft Office Online PowerPoint |
Finance and Tax Preparation Software
Personal finance software can help you identify and keep track of your bank accounts, monitor your investments, create and stick to a budget, and file your income taxes. As with office applications, personal finance software ranges from expensive commercial packages to free and online options.
Some commercial packages are Intuit Quicken, You Need a Budget (YNAB), and MoneyDance. These programs include advanced features, such as online banking and bill payment, investment portfolio tracking, and budgeting. You can also generate reports, calculate loan interest, and pay bills. When tax time comes around, you can easily gather the information you need from these applications.
If you prefer to use an online application, Mint.com (Figure 4) is a popular choice. Once you enter all your accounts, you can use Mint to track your spending. Mint also has mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows.
Tax preparation software enables you to complete your income tax returns yourself on your computer. This reduces the chance of making errors in your calculations and makes it easy to save and later retrieve your returns. You can file your return electronically or print and mail it. You can also import previous returns into a new return and generate year to year comparisons.
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| Figure 4 Track your budget and spending on Mint.com. |
Tax preparation programs walk you through the process step by step and provide you with suggestions and help throughout. The two main tax preparation programs are TurboTax from Intuit and H&R Block At Home. For simple tax returns, there are free online options. For more complex returns, you can install the full programs on your computer or use the online version. In general, the more complicated your return, the more expensive the software you need. If you start a free return and later discover that you need to upgrade to a full version, you can do so without losing any of the information you have already input (Figure 5). No matter how simple or complex your financial situation, there’s a financial software solution that you can use.
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| Figure 5 H&R Block Tax Prep |
Entertainment and Multimedia Software
Entertainment and multimedia software makes computers fun to use for education and entertainment. You can edit and identify organize your photos (Figure 6), movies, and music; play games; or learn a new skill.
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| Figure 6 Editing a Photo in Picasa |
Video and Photo Editing
Video and photo editing software enables you to create masterpieces uses from your personal photos and videos. You can spend hundreds of dollars for professional programs, but you can also find free or low cost alternatives that have almost all the features you need.
Using a free program such as Picasa that you can download from Google, a photo editing app on your mobile device, or an online tool, you can edit your images. You can crop, straighten, adjust contrast and color, and apply various effects, such as sepia or black and white most of the adjustments you’d want to accomplish. One useful feature is facial recognition or identify face matching. In Figure 7, Picasa suggests matches based upon the tags that have been applied to other images containing the same person.
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| Figure 7 Picasa’s facial recognition identifies a possible match. |
You can also create some interesting projects, such as uses a screensaver, a gift CD, a movie, or a collage. You can upload your images to the web and easily share them with others. Photo software may give you some limited ability to organize and work with your videos, but you need a true video editing program to really edit and create the movies you want.
Windows Movie Maker software is a free download, and Apple iMovie comes preloaded on Mac computers. Figure 8 shows a movie being created using iMovie. In addition, several commercial products are available for about $100. Two of the most popular are Sony Vegas Movie Studio and Adobe Premiere Elements. Because video editing requires a lot of system resources, there are few online options available, but WeVideo is one of the best online alternatives.
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| Figure 8 Creating a Video with iMovie |
Media Management Media management software is used to keep track of and play multimedia files music, TV shows, and videos on your computer. Media player software, such as Windows Media Player, Apple iTunes, and Winamp, are all examples of media management software. With iTunes, you can organize your music and videos and watch TV shows and movies (Figure 9).
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| Figure 9 You can watch TV programs using iTunes. |
Games
When you think of someone who plays video games, do you picture a young man shooting aliens? Games and simulations are more than just first person shooters, and they’re played by all sorts of people. Video game sales in 2013 reached $15.4 billion, with computer games sales accounting for about $220 million of that total. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 59 percent of Americans play video games, the average age of a video game player is 31,71 percent are over 18, and about 48 percent are female. So much for stereotypes.
Games are one type of software for which you really need to pay attention to the system requirements for installation. They take a lot of processing, memory, and video power to run well and display complex graphics software (Figure 10), and trying to play a game on an inadequate system will just frustrate you.
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| Figure 10 Skyrim |
Educational and Reference Software
Educational and reference software is a broad category of software. The increase in tablets and other mobile devices has driven the development of thousands of apps to study, plan, design, and create just about anything you could imagine. More than any other category we have discussed, educational and reference software options are mobile and cloud-based applications. Let’s look at a few of the most popular offerings.
Trip planning
When I was a kid and the family planned a vacation, we had to go to the store to buy maps, tour books, and yellow highlighters. We would spend hours uses mapping out our route, planning our stops based on the outdated information in the tour books, and hoping the food would be decent and the hotel rooms would be clean. Today, I still spend hours researching and planning our trips, but I use mobile apps or online mapping software, such as Bing Maps (Figure 11) or Google Maps, and I read online reviews from other travelers. Thanks to the software available, I can easily reroute a trip if something unexpected happens.
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| Figure 11 Windows Maps App |
Genealogy
There are many genealogy tools on the market today. One of the most popular is Family Tree Maker (Figure 12), which integrates with Ancestry.com. For Mac users, there is MacFamilyTree. You can create family trees and slideshows of your photos, view timelines and maps, and identify search through millions of historical records on the Internet.
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| Figure 12 Ancestry.com |
Home and landscape design
Want to build a deck? Plant a garden? Remodel your kitchen? Rearrange your furniture? Paint the dining room? Home and landscape design software has you covered. Free or retail, online or installed on your system, there are programs to help you design and plan all your home improvement projects.
Several online apps software allow you to compare paint colors. Just upload a picture and experiment with the color choices until you find your favorites.
Behr Paint (behr.com), Sherwin Williams Color Visualizer (sherwin-williams.com), and Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer (benjaminmoore.com) all allow you to upload and color your own photos for free and select colors from their particular paint lines. Colorjive (colorjive.com) includes colors across multiple brands (Figure 13). You should use whatever program has the color codes for the brand of paint you plan to buy.
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| Figure 13 Paint your house with Colorjive. |
Portable Apps
You may sometimes find yourself without your own computer at work, school, travel, or a friend’s house. Portable apps are programs that you can carry and run from a flash drive. They need no installation, so you can run them on just about any computer system. Your settings and data are on your flash drive not the host computer and when you remove your drive, there’s no personal information left behind.
One place to find portable apps is at portableapps.com. The Portable Apps platform is open source, and the apps are free. The same apps you use on your computer office applications, web browsers, email clients, games, and utilities identify can be run as portable apps (Figure 14).
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| Figure 14 Portable Apps |
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4 Things You Need To Know
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Key Terms
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Personal productivity software includes office
applications as well as financial and reference software.
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Entertainment software includes media management
software, photo and video editing software, and games software.
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Educational and reference software is available
for a variety of interests, including trip planning software, genealogy, and
landscaping software.
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Portable apps can be stored on and run from a
flash drive.
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open source
portable apps
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