Great Software for Your Home Office

Maybe your boss allows you to telecommute. Maybe you're your own boss. Or perhaps you work after hours from home or just take care of a lot of personal business on your PC. Whatever your scenario may be, here are ten programs to keep your home office humming. These gems will help you manage your money, your e-mail, your notes, and your time. And they'll also help you present a good image of yourself on screen and on paper. With one exception, all programs work in Windows 98 through Windows XP.

I'll skip the really common programs. After all, you don't need to know about Windows, office suites, or a good e-mail program. And you've already heard enough about antivirus software, personal firewalls, and tools to back up your data--even if you haven't actually gone out and bought them (yet).

Keep Your Money in Order

What's your financial worth? What do you owe on your credit cards? How much do your clients owe you, and when do you expect to receive their payments? What are your biggest expenses? If you're looking for a tool to manage all aspects of your financial life, Intuit's Quicken 2004 Premier Home & Business will do the job. And its $90 price is one expense worth making.

You can record transactions, balance your checking account, and track investments (if that isn't too depressing). You can also pay bills online and keep an inventory of the items in your home. If you've got a business, you might also track accounts payable and receivable. Speaking of accounts receivable, Quicken can become your invoicing system: Use its template to print out your bills or e-mail them to clients.

Protect Those Files

Got any files or folders you must protect from prying eyes? The best tool I've found for the job is Steganos Safe 5. Create a "safe" with this $23 program, and you have a virtual drive you can fill with files and access with any program. Once you close the safe, all you've got is a large file filled with incomprehensible gobbledygook, and nothing but the password will reopen it again. The safe uses a combination of 128-bit AES and 128-bit Blowfish encryption--two widely accepted standards that are as hack-proof as anything you're likely to encounter.

If you want more security tools, you can spring for Steganos Security Suite 5, which costs $56. In addition to the regular safe, the Suite lets you use a portable safe: You can create an encrypted drive with your confidential files, save this drive onto a CD, for example, and then access the drive on any PC, when yours isn't available. The portable safe comes with a read-only version of the encryption engine, so you can open files with no problem when you're on the road--but you won't be able to encrypt new files (unless you have the suite installed on your notebook, say). The Suite also provides e-mail encryption, a tool that hides encrypted files in image or sound files, a password manager, a program for cleaning up your browser and other histories, and a shredder.

Touch Up Your Images

Jasc Software's $100 Paint Shop Pro 8 is a great tool for nonbusiness chores like touching up family photos. But if pictures are a part of your business--whether it's posting real estate photos on your Web site or displaying artwork--Paint Shop Pro is a valid business tool as well.

You can do all sorts of things to your photos with Paint Shop Pro. You can correct for barrel and pin cushion distortion--that is, when images appear to curve outward or look pinched. You can remove the dreaded red-eye effect. You can add arrows, circles, and text. And if you're looking for something unusual, you can make a photo look like an oil painting.

If you're the artistic type, you can forget about photos and make your own drawings in Paint Shop Pro. Or capture images from your computer screen--an important business chore in my profession; I used Paint Shop Pro for the screen shots in this article.

Create Brochures and Business Cards

Touched-up photos are not enough. You also need great-looking brochures, newsletters, and business cards. You can create all of them in Microsoft Publisher 2002. (Note: the upcoming Publisher 2003 will be part of Microsoft's new Office Professional and Small Business editions.)

Microsoft designed its $120 Publisher to be easy to use, and by and large, the company succeeded. It comes with a wide variety of document templates to help you get a project started. These include newsletters, catalogs, business cards, Web sites, greeting cards, and even paper airplanes (like Paint Shop Pro, this doesn't have to be an all-work program).

Once you select a template--or go with a blank page--you can arrange things as you please with plenty of drawing tools, text formatting, and clip art. And it's still user-friendly: Suggestions pop up from time to time about easier ways to do things.

E-Mail and Post Your Documents

So now you've got your brochure or newsletter looking absolutely great. In addition to printing it, you want to e-mail it to clients and maybe post it on your Web site. If you're thinking about formatting to HTML, forget it. HTML--the format used for Web pages and formatted e-mail--isn't capable of handling real precision formatting.

Luckily, Adobe invented the Acrobat PDF file format, which can reproduce a document's exact look, even on systems without the same fonts. Adobe made its Acrobat Reader free, and by now almost everyone with a computer has installed it. (If you haven't, download Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0 from PC World Downloads.)

However, Adobe didn't provide a free way to create PDFs. Neither has a company called eHelp, but it has created a cheap and easy way: the $50 1-Step RoboPDF 3. If the file is printable, RoboPDF offers several ways to convert it to PDF. You can right-click the file for the program's options, load it into its native application and select RoboPDF from the list of printers, or drag and drop the file onto the RoboPDF icon on your desktop. And if that application is Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, you can use the RoboPDF toolbar, one of the program's handy features, to make the conversion happen. It works like a charm.