Perhaps one of the most used application in all offices and businesses is the spreadsheet program. As always, Microsoft Excel is the big daddy of all spreadsheet programs. Infact, you will hardly see any other spreadsheet application on a computer other than Excel. That's partly because not too many good spreadsheet programs are available, and partly because Excel comes along with Microsoft Office which again is the most used office suite. So today we are going to look beyond Excel and see what free alternatives are available for us.

Splashup is a powerful editing tool and photo manager that runs right on your browser. With all the features professionals use and novices want, it's easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photosharing sites, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress.

Just go to this site. Upload your picture and turn them into rubic cubes! There are more transformations available, though some of them you can do it yourself using Photoshop's filters.

Go to Dumpr 

Softwares cost money. We all like to use big softwares, but since they come with a high price tag we tend resort to pirated or cracked copies of the software, which is too bad. So when software publishers give away full commercial softwares for free, as a part of their promotional campaign, we shouldn't miss it. It gives us a chance to own paid softwares for free legitimately. Today I'm going to bring you 8 such softwares that are given away free for a limited time period. These aren't some useless or worthless softwares that nobody uses, rather they are some of the finest softwares that you could find. So get them before the offer expires.

Do you have any important data in an optical disc that you can't retrieve because the disc is scratched? Have you ever tried copying movies from a DVD only to find that it stops at 98%? And when you click Cancel, the whole file disappears. I have a solution to all of these problems.

With a layout similar to Google, SkreemR is indeed 'the world's greatest music search engine'. The results page displays details of each song like artist, album, song length and size and the location of the music file. Moving the mouse pointer over the link provides more detailed information about the mp3 file like bit rate, frequency etc. More links to find lyrics of the song and articles on wikipedia are provided along with. The results give you the direct download link to the file, so you just have to click on it and save the file. Finding music on the internet was never so easier.

DivXMachine is a software to convert videos into divX ( and some other formats) that completely integrates with the Windows' shell. You just have to select the videos you want to convert, right click and then choose the options from the context menu that pops out.

Update: Looking for Windows 7 Live CD?

To create a Windows XP Live CD we will require

1. Bart PEbuilder
2. A CD burner like Nero
3. A bootable Windows XP CD and
4. Some pebuilder plugins to customize the CD.

Do you know that you can run Windows applications without having Windows on your system? Yes, that's what ReactOS is.

ReactOS is an advanced free open source operating system providing a ground-up implementation of a Microsoft Windows XP compatible operating system. ReactOS aims to achieve complete binary compatibility with both applications and device drivers meant for NT and XP operating systems, by using a similar architecture and providing a complete and equivalent public interface.

You probably know what a Service Pack is. A service pack (in short SP) is a collection of updates, fixes and/or enhancements to a software program delivered in the form of a single installable package. Installing a service pack is easier and less error-prone than installing a high number of patches individually, even more so when updating multiple computers over a network.

Now spammers have started spamming inboxes from the future too!! Terminator 4?

The following list contains more than 100 sites where you can find thousands of Photoshop tutorials. Bookmark this page and you will never have to look anywhere else for Photoshop tutorials. So without wasting any more time, let's get to the good stuff.



Adobe Studio
Absolute Cross
Adobe Evangelist's Photoshop Tutorials

How many times did you have to hunt for the folder you want to view, but couldn't find it because there are just too many folders on the screen? This is when you require iColorFolder.

If you have seen Windows Vista's new way of navigating folders in explorer you will definitely agree that it's the best and quickest way to do it. Now you can have this same "breadcrumb" navigation in Windows XP with Explorer Breadcrumbs.

There is an old saying -"Prevention is better than cure". Before your precious laptop actually gets stolen why not take some steps to make it difficult for the thief to steal it? When you are in a public space like a library you are usually hesitant to leave your laptop for a few minutes, afraid that someone will take your laptop. Now there is a simple and free solution to this problem!

A lot of multimedia content on the Internet is in the form of flash files or SWF files. Animation, either interactive or non-interactive, games and small movies and clips are available on the net as SWF files. Often, we comes across pretty images or graphics in them or like their background music. I will show how you can extract those images and audio files from within the SWF files.

You must have seen ASCII art where images are created by using only text and special characters. See the image below.

Let us prepare a list of the usual softwares that you are likely to have installed on your system. You must have an(a):

audio player
video player
text file viewer
PDF file viewer
image viewer
flash player
zip/rar file opener
word document viewer
audio file converter
etc, etc, etc .....

To do that we will need a software called Camouflage. Don't worry, it's free. Camouflage allows you to hide files by scrambling them and then attaching them to the file of your choice. This camouflaged file then looks and behaves like a normal file, and can be stored, used or emailed without attracting attention.

Earlier, I had shown how you can use old floppy disks to decorate the walls of your room. Today I'm going to tackle the question: What to do with useless and spare CD ROM discs? This question is often asked and discussed in computer forums across the Internet. If you are an avid computer users and in the habit of buying games CDs, music CDs etc, you too must have accumulated quite a large number of CDs. If you are looking for a way to dispose them off, then before you throw them away have a look at 101 different ways of putting them to some kind of a use. This website has all sorts of tricks that you can do with your CDs, submitted by various people. The suggestion ranges from actually useful ones to downright stupid! Here is a preview:

There are plenty of hard disk defragmenters available that all does the same think - defragment the hard disk (of course, duh!) But all of them are on-demand defragmenters, meaning that you have to manually launch them and start the defragmenting process. It's similar to an on-demand virus scanner. An on demand virus scanner does not continuously monitor your files for viruses. A virus can get into your system and remain on your hard disk until you start the virus scanner and start scanning for viruses. The resident program type virus scanner (the usual type), on the other hand, continuously monitors and scans your files for viruses whenever you access them. These type of anti virus programs are more efficient because it enables them to catch viruses the moment it enters the computer system and before any damage can be done. The hard disk defragmenter I'm going to present today is similar to the resident program virus scanner. It runs in the background and continuously monitors the files on your hard disk. Whenever it detects fragmentation, it defragments the file keeping your hard disk completely defragmented at all times.

I came across this excellent article on WebmasterWorld.com. If you were banned from the Google adsense program at no fault of yours (it happens more often than you think), this is what you should do.

Not all movies are copyrighted. Not all movies are protected under DRM. Not all movies are paid. There do exist something called free movies, that fall under public domain or under the creative commons license. These movies have no string attached. You are free to legally download, view and distribute these movies without breaking the law. Here are 10 websites where you can get some really good movies for free.

The main reason why you would want to convert a video into a GIF animation file is to put it in your blog without streaming the video file. Not having to stream means that it will load and play in any browser and no extra video plugin is required. You can also convert your videos into GIFs and use them as avatar in online forums or put them in the profile page of a social networking site.

World Wind is an open source, 3D interactive virtual globe software created by NASA. World Wind allows any user to zoom from outer space into any place on Earth. World Wind uses satellite imagery and elevation data to allow users to experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there. Virtually visit anyplace in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara.

If you are using a word processing application other than MS Office, then sometimes you may face a problem when somebody sends you a PowerPoint slide or an Excel sheet. Since MS Office is the most widely used word processing application, file formats like .doc (MS Word document), .ppt (PowerPoint slide) and .xls (Excel sheet) has become a sort of standard among the users. But not everybody uses MS Office. You might be using OpenOffice, StarOffice etc which might refuse to open MS Office files. To deal with this problem, Microsoft has released 3 free application to view, but not edit, PowerPoint, Word and Excel files.

Hard disk space is precious, no matter how large a hard disk you own. You have paid for it so you would want to use every bit and bytes of it. With broadband becoming cheaper and faster, the need for space is becoming even more urgent. Unfortunately, Windows has a habit of slowly eating into your hard disk space as your system gets older and soon you may find gigabytes of space mysteriously lost. When you find that happening, just look for your missing disk space at the following places.

One of the most useful application to be ever bundled with Windows is the Notepad. There is no single person who haven't used Notepad at least once. Notepad creates simple, no-frills, text files where you can scribble down small notes, to do list, website urls, anything that needs to be written down. You can open files of any extension on Notepad to view their contents. You can create your own files of any extension on Notepad too. You can copy an html code into Notepad and save it with .html and it becomes an html page. Similarly, you can copy a C program into Notepad and save it with .C to create a C program file. Indeed, it's the most versatile application ever created. How would you like to include some yet more powerful features to Notepad? Enter Notepad++.