How to Save Some Big Bucks!

I don't know if I've made it clear, but I'm a big fan of saving money and making good purchases or just getting things for FREE! :-) One of my favorite things is freeware (software that's available for free download from the internet.)

For those of you that may be reading this that don't know me, I have a degree in Graphic Communications. Although I don't do much "graphics" work any more, I do like to play around some times and occasionally do some freelance design work. Since what I do is 80% play and 20% work, I am not going to spend $600 on Adobe Illustrator or $500 on CorelDraw. Instead, I've found Inkscape. It's a Vector art program that they state is "similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more." The program supports most vector file formats. I've used this program for a couple of years. It's great and guess what, it's FREE to download at http://inkscape.org/

Now I know most people are aware of what Photoshop is and if they are interested at all in photography have either played in Photoshop or wanted to but who wants to pay $700 for Photoshop? Not me! Instead, try Gimp. It's a great, FREE, downloadable software that is very similar to Photoshop. The tools, options, and ability to manipulate files is so similar to Photoshop that most users likely will not notice a difference between the two programs. You can download Gimp at http://www.gimp.org/.

And here's the golden one. For anybody who may not have Microsoft Office Software and doesn't want to pay $120-$350, just go to Open Office's website and download their suite for FREE at http://www.openoffice.org/. Open Office does accept donation if you so feel inclined to donate to them, they make that option available and if you don't want to, you still get to download the entire software suite for FREE. Their suite includes programs that are very similar to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Publisher, and Access.

If you opt to use these 3 freeware programs as opposed to their costly counterparts, you can save over $1200 easily, maybe more! So why not at least give them a shot?! By the way, I am not an affiliate for these programs, (but maybe I should be.) This is just my honest opinion on software worth using!

Also, please don't pay for fonts unless you must have a specific font that someone is requesting. If you've never googled, "Free Fonts", it's totally worth while. My two favorite free font sites are:
http://www.1001freefonts.com/ and http://www.dafont.com/.

I hope this helps someone save a little (or a LOT) of cash! :-)