Education & Reference

AlternativeTo let you find new Windows, Mac, Linux, online and mobile software based on applications you already know instead of useless categories. AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you're not satisfied with. And the "blog posts" are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.

LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and is available on all operating systems. It is an independently-developed version of the OpenOffice.org suite.

The office suite includes:

LibreOffice - Writer, a word processor with similar functionality and file support to Microsoft Office Word . It has extensive WYSIWYG word processing capabilities, but can also be used as a basic text editor.

LibreOffice - Calc , a spreadsheet program, similar to Microsoft Office Excel . It has a number of unique features, including a system which automatically defines series of graphs, based on information available to the user.

LibreOffice - Impress , a presentation program resembling Microsoft Office Powerpoint . Presentations can be exported as SWF files, allowing them to be viewed on any computer with Adobe Flash installed.

LibreOffice - Draw , a vector graphics editor and diagramming tool similar to Microsoft Office Visio . It provides connectors between shapes, which are available in a range of line styles and facilitate building drawings such as flowcharts. It also includes features similar to desktop publishing software such as Scribus and Microsoft Office Publisher .

LibreOffice - Math , an application designed for creating and editing mathematical formulae.LibreOffice - Base , a database management program, similar to Microsoft Office Access .

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia has 17 million articles (3.5 million in English), which have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access the Wikipedia website.

Google Translate is a free online translation service that can instantly translate text and web pages between over 50 languages.

The iPhone and Android versions offer voice input.

Stack Overflow, part of Stack Exchange, is a free, community-driven, reputation-based Q & A site for computer programmers. No membership is required to ask questions or provide answers to questions by others. Registered users collect 'karma' by participating, and can subsequently up- or down-vote answers by other users, leave comments and edit content in a wiki-style fashion.

Reddit (stylized in its logo as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. Registered members submit content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "subreddits", which cover a variety of topics including news, science, movies, video games, music, books, fitness, food, and image-sharing. Submissions with more up-votes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough votes, ultimately on the site's front page. Despite strict rules prohibiting harassment, Reddit's administrators spend considerable resources on moderating the site.

Zim brings the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Store information, link pages and edit with WYSISYG markup or directly typing some lightweight markup syntax and see it previewed as-you-type. Creating a new page is easy by either clicking on the "Create new note" button, by linking to a non-existing page or by writing a CamelCase name in any note. Pages are stored in a folder structure, like in an outliner, in plain text format with lightweight markup, and can have attachments (stored along the notes).

This tool can be used to keep track of TODO lists or ideas, to take notes during a meeting, to draft any other kind of text (blog entries, important mails, etc.) or to write long texts like lab research notebooks thank's to the headers structure and the table of content navigation.

Zim handles several types of formatting markup, like headings, bullet lists, checkbox, tables and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as a hybrid wiki/markdown text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links or even close the software anytime while editing without worries. The interface also provides multi-document tabs, and it remembers the cursor position in all notes for quick resuming in your note taking endeavors.

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example:

learning a languagestudying for medical and law examsmemorizing people's names and facesbrushing up on geographymastering long poemseven practicing guitar chords!

yEd is a powerful diagram editor that can be used to quickly create diagrams manually or import external data for analysis and auto-magically arrange even large data sets by just pressing a button. You can use yEd to quickly create flow charts, BPMN and UML diagrams, organization charts, mind maps, and many other kinds of diagrams, graphs, and networks. Choose from a wide range of highly sophisticated layout algorithms to automatically arrange diagrams in no time. An intuitive and visually appealing user interface makes creating diagrams fun. Once a diagram has been created, it’s easy to save, print, or export it to popular formats like PDF, SWF, EMF, SVG, JPEG, GIF, PNG, or HTML image maps.