List of My Favorite Portable Applications – Office Edition

Portable (or standalone executable) programs are usually designed to run from a USB drive or portable/external hard drive. However, you can also use them to run from Windows itself in case you don’t wanna go through the hassle of installing them.

This post is a list of all my faves. They are apps that I use personally and I heavily recommend them. (above image courtesy The Daily ACK. Article inspired by MakeUseOf.com)

AbiWord – From the website: AbiWord Portable is the lightweight AbiWord word processor packaged as a portable app, so you can edit your documents on the go. You can place it on your USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive or a CD and use it on any computer, without leaving any personal information behind.

I recommend using this if you don’t have (or want) access to MSWord or Works since it’s compatible with either.

OpenOffice Portable – From the website: OpenOffice.org Portable is the complete OpenOffice.org office suite -- including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database -- packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go.

You may not need this whole office suite. However, if you do a lot of spreadsheets and graphs for work, you can use this between you work and home PCs.

Foxit Reader – From Snapfiles: Foxit PDF Reader is an alternative to Adobe Reader, that allows you to view and print PDF files. Unlike Adobe Reader, it opens PDF files very fast, without any delay. It supports all the standard features, as well as browser integration, and also an option select/copy of text from the documents. Furthermore, you can create a snapshot from a selected portion of the page, fill interactive forms and more.

Instructions (via The Portable Freeware Collection): Download the portable launcher by clicking on the "Download" link above and extract to a folder of your choice. Then download the actual Foxit Reader software as a ZIP package and extract the single EXE file called Foxit Reader.exe to App\Foxit Reader. Rename to FoxitReader.exe (i.e. remove the space between "Foxit" and "Reader"). Launch Foxit Reader Portable.exe.

Compared to Adobe Reader’s massive bulk, Foxit Reader gets the job done and then some.

Notepad ++ – From the website: …a free (free as in "free speech", but also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

I have to admit to not using this one except a couple of times. If you use Notepad regularly or do any coding, I definitely give this one two big thumb(drives) up.