Office 2007 users.. here is great news.

Microsoft released, Office 2007 Service pack 2 yesterday

It has lot of bug fixes and nice features..

Save as PDF / ODF
Improved Charting on Excel
Speeds up Outlook
Improved picture quality on Powerpoint Presentations
and lot more..

Check out the list here..

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=953195

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Get Office 2007  Service Pack 2, download from

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If you are a windows user (by wish or by fate) and looking for “Free” softwares to improve your productivity, here you go. I have been using them for a while and so far didn’t have any issues with them. Almost everything works on Vista.

Small print: These softwares are free as of today and I’m not marketing these products.

Use Original Windows and get all the latest patches and upgrades from www.windowsupdate.com

Antivirus:
AVG Antivirus (http://free.avg.com/)

Antispyware: �
Windows Advance Care : http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download
Lavasoft Ad-aware http://lavasoft.com/single/trialpay.php

Browser:
IE comes with Windows.
Mozilla fans, use Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/)

Browser Addon:

For Internet Explorer 7  http://ie7pro.com/
For Mozilla https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

Zip/Unzip:
7-Zip http://www.7-zip.org/

PDF Creator:
Primo PDF  http://www.primopdf.com/

PDF Details Remover: If you look at Properties (File > Properties) of a PDF document, sometimes it has more personal information like your username and some document details. If you want to remove them before sending it to others use this freebie.

PDF Info http://www.bureausoft.com/products.html

Office Suite:
Open Office http://download.openoffice.org/index.html

Toolbar:
Google Toolbar  http://toolbar.google.com

Disk Management/Overview:
JDiskreport  http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

FTP:
Core FTP http://www.coreftp.com/

Uninstaller: Its much much better than windows Add/Remove programs.
Revo Uninstaller http://www.revouninstaller.com/

CD / DVD Burner:
CDBurnerXP  http://cdburnerxp.se/

Play video files:

Windows Media Player (free with Windows)�
Get free upgrade http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/default.mspx

Real Media Player (www.real.com)

Divx Codecs and Player (helps to play some wmv or avi files)  (http://www.divx.com/)

Post It Notes: For sticky notes users

Hottnotes http://www.hottnotes.com/

Screen Capture: Read my other post to know what this software is capable of.

Easy Capture http://www.xydownload.com/easycapture-19.html

Quick Navigation: Goto any directory / drive just by right clicking

Folder Guide http://www.freeware365.com/desktop/folderguide.htm

For screen capture I have been using Cropper  which is very good freebie with few interesting plugins.

It just lacked two features which I always wanted.

1. “Editing” the cropped screen shot.
2. Capture areas which needs to be scrolled up/down.

Even to draw a simple arrow, or write a comment I have to open bulky Photoshop and make changes so that I wont lose the image quality.

Today I accidentally found this great Freebie “Easy Capture” (http://www.xydownload.com/easycapture/)

It also allow you to edit the screen captures and add text, draw lines/arrows and even balloon stamps.

It has several kinds of Capture modes

1. Capture Full Screen
2. Capture Selected Region
3. Capture Screen Scrolling Windows
4. Capture Active Window
   and so on..

Along with this it also has some image editing capability like Rotation, Adjust Brighness / Contrast, Image Filters and lot more..

Its absolutely FREE and my virus scanner / spyware cleaner didnt complain about it.

Give it a shot I bet you will love it.

DOWNLOAD

Sample Image