What software do you use for business?

[JoyDivision]

I use the following for general day to day running of the business

Open Office 2.0 - Free and just as good as MS Office, I use the word processor for invoices etc and the spreadsheet for accounts. When you think MS Office costs £500 this is a huge saving.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 - Bought this a year ago for £50, its very very good, its not Photoshop CS but then its a good £400 cheaper :)

Crimson Editor - For PHP, XHTML and CSS duties, again freeware.

At this stage that is all use, although I use lots of software when fixing PCs :)

[crus]

OK,

heres a quick list of the top of my head.

XP, OS X, OS X Server, Unix varients.

Sage
Studio 8
Photoshop
BBEdit
Fetch
Illustrator
Office

Thats about it for my comfort zone.

D

[DuaneJackson]

Office 2003, Outlook Web Access, Paint Shop (yeah, yeah I know!), VB6, Dreamweaver, WS_FTP, Terminal Services Client.

[confused]

I use Ms office, I agree it is expensive, but depending on what you need, it may not be £500, but still dear, I have seen open office before and whilst IMO the word processor is fine, the database was just not up to it (then again, I usually add a lot of VBA so that might just be me)
I have photoshop 7, paid for (not by me but paid for and legit)
Corel xara which is a graphics program, I suppose you could very loosly call it a "lite" version of illustrator, I use this for most of the things I design such as business cards, stationary, flyers.
Like yourself, various other diagnostic programs, a lot of which are free or low cost.
I also use Kashflow at the moment for my accounts.

CALV

EDIT:
forgot one of the main ones lol Visual Studio, and notepad ;)

[Maroculous]

xp pro

dreamweaver
flash
director
ms office
notepad
equinox

[JoyDivision]

Oh talking of databases, I can I forget, MySQL that is what I use then just program the front end in C#.NET. Granted that is not the faint hearted and access will be a lot more suited to most small businesses, I am just cheap steak. Plus MySQL/C# is technicaly a lot better for most SME database needs Access is fine (just don't use it for websites).

I have C# Express which is like a very stripped down version of Visual Studio but it works fine and is free.

I also use Outlook Express but it has annoying habbit of loading MSN with it and being MS I want to change to a Mozzila based email program when I can be bothered.

[confused]

I also use Outlook Express but it has annoying habbit of loading MSN with it
take the tick out ;)

CALV

[JoyDivision]

I also use Outlook Express but it has annoying habbit of loading MSN with it
take the tick out ;)

CALV

It already is, the MSN dosn't show in the right bar but its clearly loaded into the memory when you see what applications are running. It loads up with Outlook.

I've checked all the services too, everything is how it should be. I don't like the idea of using Microsoft anyway apart from for operating systems and development platforms (too things MS are very good at).

[confused]

I was reffering to the tick within outlook express, Tools/Options/General/Automatically logon to messenger

CALV

[Toon]

Quickbooks
Word
Notepad
Excel
Outlook Express
Paint Shop Pro
Groupmail
Leech FTP

That's pretty much what I have open now :-)

[JoyDivision]

I was reffering to the tick within outlook express, Tools/Options/General/Automatically logon to messenger

CALV

I know, its already not ticked but every time I load up Outlook MSN loads invisiably taking up 10MB of my RAM :(

[Juvanescence]

On a daily basis..

Mac OSX

Photoshop 7
Illustrator 10
Image ready 7
Indesign 2
Dreamweaver
Word
Excel
Entourage
Acrobat
Firefox
Drop Zip
Extensis Suitcase

Now and again..

Quark
Freehand
Fireworks
Explorer
Safari
MSN messenger
iChat

What do I win? :)

[confused]

seems a bit odd, anyway what I would do is find it, and fix it. The reason I would do this is, what if you had a customer that had the same problem?

CALV

[Maroculous]

you have a couple of options to remove it

- Use MSCONFIG to stop it running during startup
- Edit

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Outlook Express

Right click in the right pane and select New, Dword value. Give it the name Hide Messenger Double click this new entry and set the value to 2.

- RunDll32 advpack.dll,LaunchINFSection %windir%\inf\msmsgs.inf,BLC.Remove (this will completely remove it)

[confused]

That reg hack doesnt always work, but usually does, dont know why I didnt think of that before, too early on a Sunday maybe ;) theres another one which I cant quite remember, I think its HKLM\software\policies\microsoft\Msn\Client or similar,and needs a dword called "StopAutorun" or somthing like that, cant remember exactly.
Also, if I recall, removing messenger totally as you suggest buggers up remote assistance.

CALV

[Maroculous]

:lol: forgot about remote assistance - but i don't like RA, i prefer pcanywhere or remote desktop

[confused]

me too, it was just a sidenote

CALV

[JustOneUK]

Frontpage (ver:2003 )
Paintshop pro (ver:8 )
Benson&hedges (ver:Special filter )
Nescafe (ver:Goldblend )

I have Paintshop Pro10 but can't decide whether to bother,
also currently trying to uninstall Benson&hedges (Special filter) :(

[jmds]

VB6 & Powerbasic for application development.
Planning to start using VB.Net, C#.net if I ever get chance to learn them.

For web development I have various editors ranging from notpad to PHPEdit.

for the office:
OpenOffice
Quicken 2004
Time & Chaos
EDraw (flowcharting software)
Treepad business edition

For Customer support
WebApp perl portal system

[Robert]

Open Office 2.0
Serif Page Plus 10
Easy Invoice UK
Photoshop elements 3.0
Freemind
Dymo Label Writer

[webit]

Oracle JDeveloper
Eclipse (withe the myEclipse plugins)
Eclipse with the PHP plugins
Tomcat
Apache
Mindmap professional
Textpad (the one and only editor apart from JEdit)
Google desktop search agent

[coxadmin]

In no order of preference or priority, the main ones I use are:

Microsoft Office 2003, especially Outlook (with Agendus add-in), Word and Excel
Timestamp
ExpressScribe
Firefox
Trillian
NetObjects Fusion 8

[KM-Tiger]

In the process of changing a lot of it:

M$ Office 2000 > OpenOffice 2.0 (Expensive > free)
Autocad 2002 LT > Bricscad 6 (about one fifth the price)
Mozilla Suite > Firefox
Debian/Postfix/Cyrus/PostgreSQL/Apache/Opengroupware (nearest I can get to M$ Exchange Server for free!)
Debian/SAMBA as file server/PDC (does everything Windows servers do for free)
TASBooks and TASPayroll for accounting. (Thinking about SQL-Ledger for accounting instead)
A very old version of Paintshop Pro for the tiny amount of work we do with images.