Free Microsoft-compatible office suite

A year ago, the fine folks at SoftMaker in Germany were giving away their terrific SoftMaker Office Suite 2006 for free; I blogged about it here. They're repeating the offer -- except this time it's the newer SoftMaker Office Suite 2008 that's free. It's well worth grabbing -- and SoftMaker makes a donation to charity for each download. (This isn't their latest version; that's SoftMaker Office Suite 2010, and it costs money.)

For WordStar users like me, the included TextMaker wordprocessor optionally supports the WordStar keyboard interface. Just select Tools, Customize, Keyboard Mappings and switch from "Default" (Word-like) to "Classic" (WordStar-like).

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Wordnik

Wordnik is a cool new free online dictionary site. Look up words here, and read the FAQ here for what makes it special.

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ZTreeWin 2.0

My favorite Windows file manager, ZTreeWin, has just been updated to version 2.0, and now supports Unicode filenames. The latest version works with NT, 2000, XP, and Vista, and will work with Windows 7 when it's out. Get it here.

I love, love, love this program.

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Q10: cool little clean-screen text processor

Over on my Facebook page, Kelly John Rose recommended Q10, a nifty little full-screen text processor that's totally free. Install, press F1 for help. Gives you a clean, empty monitor to write with (suppresses all the usual Windows gewgaws). Download the second version -- the one with the spell checker (I missed seeing it the first time I visited the page).

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Software for writers

Way back in 1985, I got a copy of the CP/M version of Grammatik for my Osborne 1 computer. Grammatik scanned documents for obvious grammatical errors (which I almost never made), homonym confusion ("weight" instead of "wait"), wordiness, and so on. For a year or two, I ran it on every article I wrote (back then, my writing business was mostly magazine articles), and I actually found it useful. I was already a good writer selling a lot of work, but I've never been one to turn down help. In particular, it showed me that I was using many unnecessarily wordy phrases (such as "at this time" instead of "now").

Later on, I got a copy of Correct Grammar for DOS, which was a similar package. I wrote macros for WordStar (which I still use) to let me check blocks of text through either Grammatik or Correct Grammar, and I do sometimes still use them when I have to bang out something for publication and the deadline is so tight I won't have time to proofread in hardcopy.

Of course, these days, Microsoft Word comes with a style checker. What's amazing is how little advanced such software is in 2009 over what was available a quarter of a century ago. Here's a great interview from the New York Times with Bruce Wampler, principal architect of Grammatik, on that topic.

Anyway, an ad showed up in my inbox this week for a standalone package that tries to be a more-modern version of Grammatik. Looking around, I found there are several such programs on the market. I haven't tried any of them, but here are the ones that turned up in my search:

• Editor
  
• Grammar Expert Plus
  
• myWriterTools
  
• StyleWriter
  
• WhiteSmoke

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