Various Software - Free and Useful!

[Camy]

If you find any useful software that you would be happy to recommend to others then this is the place to wail on about it.

TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus

A Comprehensive and Easy-to-use Language Reference System

TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a professional software package that integrates a complete dictionary and multifaceted thesaurus of the English language into a single and powerful language reference system.

TheSage can look up words directly from almost any program (IE, Word, Firefox, Outlook, Thunderbird,... ) and is 100% portable.

http://www.sequencepublishing.com/thesage.html

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I run windows 2000 and The Sage has hung a couple of times, but then my system isn't as stable as I'd like.

All in all I think this is a wonderful free tool for writers. You can also run it off a USB 'stick' drive.

[Camy]

HTML editing.

Crimson is a wonderful free HTML editor. I use this program a lot because it's small, fast and well laid out. You can also use it for CSS, XML, C/C++, Perl and Java

It's also better than notepad for those quick off the cuff novels, short stories and poetry.

http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

[Camy]

MS Word Templates.

The BBC has a set of MS Word templates, for writers.

They are free, which is always a good thing!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/scriptsmart/

[Jay B]

If you like to use MS Word to write stories and export them as webpages...well, don't. Word does a terrible job at it and produces bloated, often unreadable files that may or may not contain personal info about their author. If, however, you don't know much about HTML and can't afford a commercial product like Adobe Dreamweaver to create web pages, I reccomend this: http://textism.com/wordcleaner/

It's a web-based tool that cleans up MS Word-generated web pages. It will clean documents up to 20k in size (not very big) for free. If you don't mind shelling out 20 euro through pay pal, you can clean up to 75 docs a month of any size. For what it's worth, I know nothing about it's author other than the fact that he does good work. I do know it's a lot cheaper than Dreamweaver (which is currently retailing for > $1000) and quite easy to use. You upload a MS Word-generated file, it gives you back nice, clean HTML.

[Resurgam]

EVERYTHING Search Engine - Voidtools

If you want to search your whole computer very quickly for anything - a lost file you half remember the name of, a download that went missing, all the .ico or .msi files, or whatever - then I thoroughly recommend this tiny search tool. I've used several versions over the years - find the latest version entirely free and with no nasty T&Cs at www.voidtools.com or from most reputable download sites. So much quicker and more effective than the search tool built into MS Windows.