There are a number of very helpful software tools out there to make me more productive at home and when I’m at work. Some are downloaded for free and some you must pay for. In particular I am thinking about the importance of antivirus software for my computer.

If you need virus protection only for your home computer, you can find some pretty good products for free. The experts say that the free software will defend against the worst threats, but it is necessary to also add software to cover Trojan horses and adware. You need to pay for a full package if you want complete protection that is not available from the free versions.

The world of commerce is moving more and more towards a paperless atmosphere, and to stay current we need to be able to organize files from many different software programs. Translating to pdf format spreadsheets, database results, document files and photographs will be more and more common.

You’ll find a few different competing companies that offer products to facilitate working with pdf files. Adobe Acrobat is probably the best-known software package and they offer a few choices of products in that family from which you can choose. If all you want to do is read pdf files, and do not need to edit or create them, the free Reader software may be all you need.

Whichever file management software you select, you’ll find that there are significant time savings in being able to quickly work with pdf files. Unless some new file type takes its place, the need for pdf file format is not going away any time soon.