Sourceforge is a good place to look for free software.
EasyReg International is a user-friendly (point and click) econometrics program written by Herman Bierens at Penn State. Particularly useful for teaching econometrics. gretl is also good.
Octave describes itself as “a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations.” It is a very powerful package that can run Matlab programs with minor modifications. James P. LeSage of the University of Toledo has made available the Econometrics Toolbox for Matlab. It provides many functions, comes with good documentation, and (presumably) can also be used with Octave.
For professional document production, there is now a complete (working) version of LyX for Windows. It is a very easy way to use LaTeX without actually knowing anything about LaTeX.
Maxima is a powerful computer algebra system similar to Mathematica or Maple. It has features such as symbolic differentiation, which is helpful for numerical optimization, for instance. Maxima can be used as a plug-in for TeXmacs.
OpenOffice.org is a productivity suite similar to Microsoft Office. A great feature of OOo is the export to pdf button. Making PDF files is trivial with OOo. I'm not a big fan of the spreadsheet in OOo, so I instead use Gnumeric.
Mozilla Firefox is
in my opinion the best available browser, far ahead of Internet
Explorer. I really miss tabbed browsing and the search toolbar when
going back to IE. Thunderbird is
a great email client that also reads RSS feeds.
Page last updated 01/25/2006