Many people rely on software such as Microsoft Office, Photoshop and Adobe Acrobat for their day to day work, but did you know that there are free alternatives to most expensive software packages that are just as functional but completely free?

LibreOffice will open, edit and save Word, Excel and PowerPoint files and allow you to share files with people without the outlay of at least £100 on MS Office.


When it comes to email clients, Thunderbird is an excellent alternative to Outlook. It will handle most types of email accounts (with the exception of Exchange) and you can install plugins to add extra features, such as calendars and syncing with Google accounts.


There's lot of free software available that does an excellent job, often better than the paid options.

Other examples are Audacity for editing audio files, GIMP for editing and manipulating photos and images rather than Photoshop.  CutePDF will let you easily print any documents to a PDF file and includes some of the features included in Acrobat.

It's worth remembering that all new Macs will come with Apple's Pages, Numbers, Keynote and Mail which replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook so you may not even need the software above.

Windows 8.1 and 10 also have a very functional updated version of Wordpad pre-installed and this again can be used in place of Word.

Modern versions of Office on Windows and Mac and now directly export PDFs so a lot of the functionality that we used to pay for is now being included as standard.

If you're looking for a specific application that you need, please let us know and we'll help you find the best tool for the job, free of charge.