Microsoft Office is the standard when it comes digital documents today. If you can't open, edit, or create .doc files, you can't do anything from business to basic schoolwork.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's Office Suite costs several hundred dollars at the cheapest, and over a thousand for the "fancier" versions. Plus, it's a bloated, poorly made set of programs that haven't improved more than aesthetically in years.

Thankfully, there is a better alternative. It actually works well, and it won't cost you a thing.

OpenOffice.org comes with it's own versions of what Microsoft calls Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, and MathType. And they are fully compatible. You can work seamlessly with .doc, .xls, and .ppt files, or you can use OpenOffice's more efficient native formats.

Here we have a great desktop publishing program to rival Microsoft Publisher.

Make posters, cards, and whatever other sort of publications you could need.

Scribus is very similar to OpenOffice's Draw program, so if you already use that, you might not need both, but there are there are enough differences to check it out.

Basically, it just comes down to a matter of preference. I would recommend trying both to see which you prefer.

Move over PhotoShop. Sure, PhotoShop is nice and easy to use, and by itself it's a pretty good program. I'll give it that.

But it's far too expensive. Besides, it can't quite match the power of GIMP. It doesn't have nearly the availability of plug-ins that GIMP has either.

Now I'll be frank, GIMP can be a bit overwhelming at times. This is just because it has so much to offer as a high quality graphics program.

It's not for everyone, and it has a bit of a learning curve, but it's a must-have for anyone who's into image manipulation.

Here's another great graphics program for you, but unlike the others, this one is for creating graphics, not just editing them.

Inkscape is a vector graphics program. Scalable Vector Graphics (or SVGs) are images that are composed of shapes, lines, and colors instead of pixels. Basically it means that an SVG can be infinitely enlarged without quality loss.

Inkscape is a great free alternative to Adobe's Illustrator.

This is the program I use for initially creating the graphics for this website.

IrfanView isn't Open Source, but it is useful enough to be included here anyway.

It has some basic image editing features which can be useful, but its real strength lies in its batch processing.

Ever wanted to take an image, crop it, resize it, compress it, and rename it? Easy, right? Unless of course you need to do it to a hundred images at once.

With IrfanView's batch feature, you can pre-set the parameters, and apply them to as many images as you want all at once. Then just sit back, and let the program do all the editing for you.

GIMP a bit too much for you, huh? That's okay. You can still get a great free alternative to PhotoShop which isn't quite as intimidating.

Paint.NET may not have quite the number of features as GIMP, but its intuitive, easy-to-use interface makes up for it.

It's a the perfect solution for image touch-ups and basic graphic projects.

I typically jump between Paint.NET and GIMP for image editing depending on the complexity of the given project. I use both for creating this website.

Audacity is a high quality audio recorder and editor. It is comparable to (although better than) programs such as NCH's WavePad.

You can use it for a variety of things such as making and editing your own recordings, remixing music, or even recording streaming music from the web.

Audio people will probably have more use for this than others, but chances are that it will come in handy for you as well.

Avidemux is a video editor. Plain and simple.

It's not quite as flashy as Adobe's Premiere, but it works, and it is very easy to use.

As an added bonus, it's not nearly as resource intensive as its proprietary cousin. The start-up time is just a second or two, and the rendering is pretty fast as well.

While you're probably not going to be using it to piece together your feature-length films any time soon, Avidemux is the perfect solution for your home videos or YouTube clips.

I'll give you a head's up right now. This program has a huge learning curve. But if you can get past that, the results are amazing.

Blender is a professional 3D creator, animator, and renderer.

It has been used for projects ranging from the famous Open Source movie, Elephant's Dream, all the way to the blockbuster hit, Spiderman 2!

If you want to get into 3D modeling, don't even think about using anything other than Blender.

A viewer of my site brought this awesome program to my attention, and I apologize for taking so long to get the review on here. Nonetheless, here it is.

Pencil is a 2D animation creation program. It allows you to design and animate your projects using both bitmap and vector graphics.

I still have not experimented with it as fully as I would like to, but it seems to be a pretty powerful piece of software with a lot of potential.

Plus, it's Open Source! You can't go wrong there.

Video and audio converters are a dime a dozen. They're everywhere. Go to any software-downloading site and you'll find scores of them.

The problem is, most don't work very well. I can't for the life of me figure out why the software world is so plagued with buggy conversion programs.

Save yourself the trouble, and just download SUPER. It can convert between a huge list of various media formats, and it almost always works.

Now do notice that I said almost always. I have had a few odd files that it didn't like, but I do go through a lot of file conversions.

Just suffice it to say that SUPER's track-record is way better than anything else out there, and of course it's completely free (although not Open Source).

This is another one of those programs which is Freeware, not Open Source, but it's just so awesome that I had to include it anyway. It is quite simply the best music player out there.

Forget Windows Media Player or iTunes. They're big, bulky, hog memory, only play specific formats, and are all-around unpleasant programs to deal with.

MediaMonkey, on the other hand is not nearly as memory intensive, plays nearly all available formats, and is supremely easy to use. And its database system is absolutely second to none.

The free version is fully featured, and is by itself far better than the other media programs out there, but there is also a paid upgrade should you desire a few extra features.

Ever acquired a video file that you couldn't play? Or one that played sound or video but never both? Then, you probably searched across the Internet for the correct codecs needed to make Windows Media Player work, and chances are you picked up some Spyware along the way.

Well, say goodbye to all that!

VLC is a small lightweight program that simply works. No more extra codecs needed. They're all built in from the start, so all you have to do is click play and enjoy.

First let me say that, when it comes to making websites, you simply can't beat writing it by hand.

That said, not everyone wants to learn HTML. If that's the case for you, NVU is your next best option.

It's easy to use, and it makes some pretty clean code. That's way more than can be said about Microsoft's FrontPage.

NVU is a great program for those who don't know HTML or for those who are still learning it.

This may not be for everyone, but if you're a developer, you're going to want SciTE.

It's an extremely light-weight program with support for nearly all programming and scripting languages.

SciTE is very convenient when working with a lot of code. It brings all the different parts into one simple program.

I use SciTE for writing and editing the HTML and the CSS for this website.

Get a lot of files from the Web? Then you have to deal with a lot of different types of archives.

You've got the standard .zip and .rar of course, and then there's the occasional .tar or .gzip. 7-Zip handles them all.

It can create archives as well, and it provides the full set of options in doing so.

This one of those programs that you just need to have.

Not Open Source, but this is still one of the best Bible programs available.

You can use it to just read the Bible, of course, but it also has excellent searching and reference tools. You can download tons of additional Bible versions and commentaries for it, and it even includes a version that directly links each word to the original Hebrew or Greek.

If you're looking for a digital Bible and a great reference tool, look no further than E-Sword.

Every living human being who owns a computer needs to have Firefox installed. Period. There is really no good excuse for not using it. Everything is done on the Internet these days, and that makes the Internet browser a practical second operating system.

Internet Explorer is woefully inadequate in every area. It's security is a joke, and it still doesn't even begin to properly support W3C standards. That may or may not mean much to you, but suffice it to say, Internet Explorer is absolute garbage.

That alone is enough for me to switch over to Firefox (which has none of Internet Explorer's shortcomings), but it's real strength lies in the wealth of add-ons available. It can be customized to do just about anything.

Firefox 3 was downloaded over eight million times on the day it was released! Do yourself a favor and download it too.

Need to burn a CD or DVD? Don't want to shell out for Nero or Roxio?

InfraRecorder is all you need. It has all the features you could want in a burner program. This includes support for ISO images, mixed-mode CDs, dual-layer DVDs, and more.

It's not particularly glamorous, but it does everything required, and you certainly can't beat the price.

Do you have important documents just lying around on your hard drive? Anything that could be a security risk if found by the wrong people?

Or, maybe you (like me) just enjoying thoroughly hacker-proofing your computer and its files.

Whatever the reason, if you need the ultimate security for some files on your computer, TrueCrypt is the way to go.

It works by creating a hidden virtual hard drive that only shows up when you open it by entering the password through the program. Once the virtual hard drive has been mounted, it acts just like any other hard drive on your computer. You can cut, copy, and paste your files in it.

When you're done, just dismount it, and it becomes completely invisible again.

You cannot buy better security for your files.