OxygenOffice Professional
OpenOffice based premium office suite

OpenOffice is a very capable office suite but it does lack some of the multimedia elements of some alternatives such as clip art.

OxygenOffice Professional redresses this balance with a large collection of extras including clip art, sample documents and templates. A collection of more than 90 fonts is also installed.

As clip art and templates are one of the selling points of StarOffice over OpenOffice, this is a very attractive download.

The rest of OpenOffice is included, with the word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing software. OpenOffice has its own file format but is also compatible with most of the features in Microsoft Office files
Win 98/2000/XP

Jarte

Jarte is a powerful, free word processor and Wordpad replacement with a unique interface.Features include RTF and DOC support, OLE support, tabbed document access, spell check, page breaks, print preview, visual header & footer designer, clip history, online reference bar, multi-level undo & redo, customizable background, bookmarking, and many more.A detailed Help file is included.Jarte is free.No ads, no nag screens, and no trial period.
Win 2000/XP

TED Notepad

TED Notepad is a growing freeware editor for true plain-text. It looks like a small Notepad, but is more and more fertile in innovative features, text-processing functions and other tools.
All of them on hotkeys; all designed for quicker and advanced editing.
The light-weight portable application fits on USB drive and loads instantly with no installation required.
TED Notepad is designed especially for daily writing of notes, lists, scripts and html files.

Get ready for a simple text editor, yet full of new features and text tools - you will never learn them all. Don't type, ted it!
Win NT/2000/XP/Vista for Windows 95/98/ME click here

NoteTab light
Text/html editor

NoteTab Light is the ultimate free Notepad replacement and a capable HTML editor. A slimmer version of the award-winning NoteTab Pro, this slick application makes text editing a breeze. Move quickly around a stack of large files with a simple tabbed interface. Format your text to your heart's content. Write with the font of your choice, fixed-width or proportional.

Key Features
Open and edit many documents at once
Capable of editing huge text files
Text drag-and-drop editing
AutoCorrect/Auto-replace mode
Clip tool for quick and easy text insertion
Capture text sent to Clipboard

If you need to cut and paste chunks from a pile of files, forget the Clipboard: you can set up a Paste Board file to save text clips automatically. Strip HTML tags from your files. Call up complete document statistics instantly. Use powerful, system-wide search and replace tools.

Speed up your work with text macros: you can use them as shortcuts, or even to auto-replace those persistent typos. Handy sample macro libraries are supplied, and you can easily build your own. Make the most of NoteTab's many options to suit your own workstyle.

There's more, much more, in this package -- try the finest piece of freeware available today

Last Updated 06 October 2007
Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista

Scribus
Open souce desktop publishing suite

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout.

Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
Win 98/Me/NT/2000/XP
Linux
Mac 8/9

AbiWord
Open-source word processing

AbiWord is a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word.
It is suitable for typing papers, letters, reports, memos and any other document.
The program has an attractive, professional interface and all the features you need.
In addition, it offers various plug-ins that can be added to further enhance the functionality.
Currently available plug-ins include several imaging tools, encyclopedia, Babelfish translation, scripting support and various others.
AbiWord comes with a built-in spell checker, auto-text macros, save as web page option and much more.
A very nice and well established open-source alternative to commercial word processing programs.

Last Updated 07 May 2008
Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
Linux
Mac

PagePlus SE 

PagePlus SE is the easiest way to get professional desktop publishing results on your desktop printer. With your PC, printer, and PagePlus, you can save time and money. No experience required!

• Ads & Brochures
• Business Stationery
• Flyers & Forms
• Invitations
• Greeting Cards
• Over 500+ free templates

Why use PagePlus SE?
PagePlus is so versatile and simple to use that even a desktop publishing novice will be up and running in minutes. With a whole host of preset document layouts, automated templates, fantastic color schemes and artistic effects, this free download enables anyone to produce professional looking results.

DTP vs Word Processing
Discover how Desktop Publishing gives you far greater control over your document layout compared to word processing, allowing you to get really creative with all your text and designs.

Download Free Templates
Over 500 free designs and templates are available for you to use once you’ve downloaded PagePlus SE. They make the design process even faster without compromising on the professional quality that has established PagePlus as an award-winning Desktop Publishing package.
Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

TxE8

TxE8 is a unique flexible word processor with a fantastic interface. It's easy to use, powerful and 100% free.
It loads extremely fast, can handle very large documents, can e-mail your documents (without using another program), and it has Drag and Drop support.
It has many unique features, like the on-screen Find-bar to find things fast, and the Add text panel, which allows you to insert frequently used words quickly.
Win 95/98/NT/2000/XP

Atlantis Nova 

Unlike much of the competition, Atlantis has been carefully designed with the end-user in mind. Most commands are only one-mouse-click-away. With a fully customizable interface and a whole array of very powerful functions, Atlantis gives you total control over the viewing, handling, editing and protection of your documents. Beyond the traditional word processing functions, you are provided with graphic-type tools to format your documents. You will use special brushes to apply format templates, color, and highlighting to your draft documents, just as an artist adds touches of color to a picture! The "As-You-Type" AutoCorrect and Spellchecker of Atlantis will guarantee that all your documents have perfect language.
Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP

Notepad2

Notepad is great for quickly editing text documents but it is basic and this can make it harder to use. Notepad2 aims to keep the simplicity of Notepad as far as possible but adds a host of very useful extras.

At first glance the greatest difference of Notepad2 is a list of icons in a toolbar. These include the fairly standard copy, paste and save functions but also some useful extras such as turning on word wrap and changing the size of the text.

There is a huge list of keyboard shortcuts; probably too many for most casual users but useful to have.

There are instructions available on how to replace Windows Notepad with this more capable version.

Those who like Notepad for editing files such as HTML web pages will find Notepad2 especially useful as it can colour code commands and other programming text. This is also a great help for anyone learning to write in a programming language
Win 2000/XP

xint 

"xint" (pronounced "zint") is an alternative to Windows notepad, with dozens of useful functions. The focus is on efficiency and performance and thus there are no toolbars, redundant dialogs, or other uneccesary components. Most of the functions are accessible via hotkeys, and extra formatting options are also availible through a convenient floating menu (screenshot) that is activated also via hotkeys or the system menu to wherever your cursor happens to be. Make extracting html content from a textfile, or alternately, saving only the html easy. Turn tab space delimited text files into comma delimited files, or, vice-a-versa. xint does the standard find and replace much quicker then with regular notepad. Another thing that is of great convenience, is "Twofish" encryption. Use "Twofish", a military-strength 160-bit encryption algoritm to securely hide sensitive data. xint is a fairly resource-friendly application which comes with an uninstaller. Hope you find it useful.

Tested on the window platforms below.
Win 2000/XP

NeoOffice
OpenOffice designed specifically for the Mac

NeoOffice is a fully-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. Based on the OpenOffice.org office suite, NeoOffice has integrated dozens of native Mac features and can import, edit, and exchange files with other popular office programs such as Microsoft Office.

Released as free, open source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), NeoOffice is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use. The software is actively developed, so improvements and small updates are made available on a regular basis.
Mac OS X 10.3 or higher

Notepad++
A free source editor and Notepad replacement

Notepad++ is a free source editor and Notepad replacement with the syntax highlighting (supported language for the moment: c/c++/Java/html/xml/php/asp/vb/vbs/SQL/Objective-C/javascript/ini/makefile/MSDos Display ).

It also gives the extra functionality to the general user: colorize the user defined words.
You can print your source code in color (or whatever you want) if you have a color printer (WYSIWYG). Furthermore, Notepad++ includes the multi-view feature, which allows the user to edit the different documents at the same time, and even edit the same document synchronously in 2 different views.

Notepad++ supports drag and drop: not only you can drop the file from explorer to open it, but also you can drag and drop a document from a view to another.
With all the functionalities, Notepad++ runs as fast as Notepad provided by MS Windows.

Last Updated 8 May 2008
Win 98/Me/NT/2000/XP

TextShield

TextShield is a free, compact word processor with a wealth of features. Besides those features available with most ordinary word processors, TextShield has many advanced (but easy-to-use) features. TextShield can compress files automatically using the popular ZIP compression, making them as much AS 95% smaller. TextShield saves files in the universal RTF format, or in plain text. TextShield is both a word processor and a plain text editor. For maximum interchangeability, TextShield has a build-in HTML converter and can save files as Microsoft Word, and other formats, using Microsoft converters. TextShield supports advanced formatting features, like hyperlinks, underlining styles, Rainbow Colors and even 3D Text. TextShield is compact and can easily fit a single 1.44Mb floppy disk (try installing Word on a floppy).
Win 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP