In 10 days, I will complete my last course and earn my Masters of Business Administration. The reason I say that is because I was able to make it through college without ever paying for Microsoft Office. In this post, I want to share my "Open-source starter pack" and give credit to the free software that helped me make it through school.
Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel have a virtual monopoly on office software. Even a basic copy of Office can run $150, and ditching MS Office is the number one way that students can save money on software. OpenOffice and LibreOffice are two free alternatives to MS Office. Each suite has its own Excel (Calc), Word (Writer), and PowerPoint (Impress) substitute. Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice can save your finished product in MS Office formats, so you can still submit your work as a .ppt or .doc file to comply with your professor's rules. 90% of your time as a student will be spent writing reports or making a presentation. If I could only recommend one open-source program, it would be LibreOffice.
Thankfully, I did not have to do a lot of videos or audio editing in school, but I realize that multi-media presentations are becoming increasingly important. There are three tools that I have found indispensable for making video productions. OpenShot is my video editor of choice. This program is completely free. There are a few other open-source video editing programs that are "better" and more powerful, but I have found OpenShot to be the most intuitive and easy to use. Anyone using screen recordings in their videos should take a look at OBS. This is a great screen recorder, and I use it to make all of my YouTube videos as well as Udemy courses. Last, but certainly not least, Audacity is a great audio editing program for cleaning up the audio on a video.
The programs discussed above are a great first step towards embracing open-source software, but as I entered grad school, I needed some "heavier duty" mathematics programs. To complete the statistical analysis portion of my senior thesis, I used Gnumeric. Gnumeric is a great, free statistics package that is a very good alternative to SPSS. SPSS currently costs $99 per person per month, so using Gnumeric is a great way to save some money. Gretl is a free Econometrics and regression application that can be useful for estimating relationships between dependent and independent variables. I found Octave to be a good substitute for MATLAB, and wxMaxima is a solid Computer Algebra System.
If you are a lucky student your college provides free access to programs such as MS Office or SPSS, but I still encourage you to explore open-source alternatives. Once you graduate, you may want to start your own business or become a freelancer. If you embrace open-source software while in school, you won't have to worry about buying expensive proprietary software once you are starting your business. In summary, this post is a big thank you to all of the people who have given their time to making free and open-source software available for the masses and an invitation for more people to join the open source movement.
