Free Computer Software

In researching a company's financial statements, perhaps the most informative, but most difficult financial statement to produce (from an accounting perspective) is the statement of cash flows. The statement of cash flows is designed to show investors how well a company is doing based on their cash. It is the equivalent of looking at your own finances and making sure that your checking account has a positive balance and that you aren't using credit cards to make it have a positive balance. Interestingly enough, Microsoft Corp. paid out $36 million in dividends to their shareholders in 2005 and they bought back $8 million of their own stock (which is another way for the board of directors to increase their stock price without having really good financial results).

After all these activities, Microsoft actually lost cash of almost $10 million in 2005, but since 44 million of that was not used in operations, but rather to give their investors more cash, they really made a TON of cash in 2005.

Why do you think this is? Perhaps it's that they charge $900 per copy of Microsoft Project, or $350 per copy of Microsoft Office. Perhaps, it's that they charge $299 per copy of their operating systems (Windows XP, Windows NT ...). Don't get me wrong, I think a company is entitled to charge for their product, but everyone knows that Microsoft's prices are exorbitant. This could bring me into a discussion about anti-trust law and how it has changed since the days of the oil and steel monopolies of the early 20th century....But maybe some other time.

Today I wanted to list a couple of options for "free" software that are alternatives to popular software out there. Because they are free, they aren't going to be as nice or polished as the expensive versions, but they certainly will work on your Windows machine. There is a huge list of these "Open Source" options at www.osalt.com

• Microsoft Word
• AbiWord - http://www.abisource.com/
• Open Office Writer - http://www.openoffice.org/product/writer.html
• Microsoft Excel
• Open Office Calc - http://www.openoffice.org/product/calc.html
• Gnumeric - http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Open Office Impress - http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html
• Microsoft Project
• GanttProject - http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net/
• Open Workbench - http://www.openworkbench.org/
• Microsoft Access
• Open Office Base - http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html
• Instant Messenger (these are free already, but this one lets you use multiple accounts (AIM/Yahoo/MSN etc...)
• GAIM - http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
• Windows!! (I don't suggest these to non-computer oriented people because they are more difficult to use than windows)
• Fedora (Linux) - http://fedora.redhat.com/
• Ubuntu (Linux) - http://www.ubuntu.com/
• Suse (Linux) - http://www.opensuse.org/

Well, there you have it Good Luck! - Merry Christmas!