Free Fonts and Clip Art And a Free Slideshow Maker

I was reading an article about free MS Office substitutes and ran across one called Oxygen Office. Kay, from Clever Someday (on my bloglist!) and I were working on a collaboration on a post about the Word Art feature some time ago, before life got so crazy for both of us! Word Art allows you to create text in many shapes and styles, (including circles and vertical text), and the results can be used with SCAL. Free Office replacements Open Office and Symphony both have the Word Art feature but handle it differently. It's been some time since I compared them but I believe I thought Open Office was much easier to use and a lot like the Microsoft version, if you already are familiar with it.

As I found out tonight, Oxygen Office is based on Open Office (OO), but this version has a ton of free for home and commercial use fonts and clip art included - hopefully some will be compatible with SCAL! I say hopefully because at the time of writing this, I'm downloading this FIVE HUNDRED AND FORTY TWO MB file, sheesh! It's all the free fonts and clip art, hehe. If you have a slow connection, it will take a while to download!

From the website:

• OxygenOffice Professional is a free and open source enhancement of official OpenOffice.org. The OxygenOffice Professional Team has modified the source of OpenOffice.org and bundled lot of extras with it. Here are just a few of the extras you get with OxygenOffice Professional: More than 3,400 graphics are included, both clip art and photos. These pictures are integrated into the gallery and can easily be placed into any OxygenOffice document. Several templates and sample documents are included, as well as over 90 fonts. The extras are integrated by default in the installation of OxygenOffice Professional, but they are optional, so the user can decide what parts to include and what parts to leave out. These extra templates, fonts, and graphics are free for both personal and professional use. Additional tools like OOoWikipedia, which can search the free on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia, are also included.

There's also a portable version available for running on flash drives on other people's computers! And, there's 64 bit compatible version available, too. Here's a link to the most recent Windows release at the time of this writing.

Now I'm off to play around with it some. I will tell you (since I had to look it up): If you want to see the included clip-art in Oxygen, click Tools, then Gallery.

Oh, and the free software available TODAY ONLY from Give Away of the Day is Wondershare Photo Story. Wondershare usually gets high marks on that site from people who review software there nearly everyday. This program makes photo slideshows that you can set to music and burn on a DVD/CD if you like, or even put on an Ipod. Those of you who like digital scrapbooking should love this! Here's the link.