The tools listed below are where I spend most of my work time, ordered from most used to least:
Daily for time sheets, checking bank statements and general emails
Accounting - GNUCash
Web browsing - Mozilla Firefox
Email - Mozilla Thunderbird
Twice weekly for invoicing
Planning - Classmaker
Mail Merge reports - Microsoft Word 2003 (the data source is an HTML file emitted by Classmaker)
PDF Creation - Print to CutePDF
Once a week
Backup - Classmaker
Off-site backup - Google Drive
Once a fortnight
Scanning - Windows Paint
Creating multipage PDF's from scanned images - IrfanView
Spreadsheet - LibreOffice Calc
Word Processor - LibreOffice Writer
Once in a blue moon!
Chart creation - LibreOffice Draw
Desktop publishing - Scribus
When things go horribly wrong!
Puppy Linux Tahr 6.0 on a USB stick
- Puppy has saved me several times over the years when Windows 7 hasn't booted or file corruptions have occurred.
- The most recent incident involved OLE embedding a LibreOffice Draw file inside a LibreOffice Writer document. Don't do this! That technology is unstable and you will find yourself locked out of the Writer document as somehow ALL the file permissions get removed. The only way to retrieve the file is to boot into Linux, move the file into a Linux partition and then copy it back.
- Instead of OLE embedding, export your Draw file to disk as a PNG image and then insert that into your Writer document.
