PowerPoint gets the bad reputation as being the evil piece of Microsoft Office designed to create disinterest and loathing of all public presentations. That’s mostly because people simply use it incorrectly. Instead of complementing a presentation, people have a bad habit of using slides as notes they read to an audience, which translates to boring. Presentation Zen offers an interesting perspective on applying photography’s rule of thirds to PowerPoint slides by analyizing a number of promotional videos and looking at what makes them interesting. Peter over a blog.forret.com adds to the discussion Peter Forret’s Flickr stream.

DupKiller – Duplicate files on your system can create confusion, waste space and generally reduce productivity. Instead of wasting brain cycles on which file is the one to keep – eliminate all those dupes efficiently with DupKiller. This is the best freeware duplicate file remover I’ve ever used. Just make sure you don’t confuse dupes with a backup copy (see Replicator below).

Free Accounting Software – The name says it all. With features on par with basic products from Quicken or Microsoft Money, you can easily manage your finances without ever needing to spend another dime.

FreeMind – Mind mapping software is the ultimate tool for free-form idea generation and organization. While some of the competing pay applications have a few more features (like Microsoft Office integration), FreeMind does an awesome job of getting you most of the features you might want to use mind mapping for.

Folder Marker – Keep track of projects, files and deadlines by visually marking folders on your desktop. For the Getting Things Done crowd or simply for those who want folders in more flavors than just Windows yellow, Folder Marker helps you quickly locate and act on information.

Folder Size – Add folder size information to Windows Explorer. If you ever run low on hard disk space, the detective work to find the culprit can be brutal without drilling down on every folder. Folder Size adds the all important folder size data to Windows Explorer to make locating file bloat a breeze.

Karen’s Replicator – Backup files, folders or entire drives on a schedule. While duplicate files can be a nuisance, having a backup of files is a must. There’s nothing worse than losing your work. Replicator is quick, easy, and the scheduling makes it a breeze to make sure you don’t forget to do it.

Kurlo – Contact management that actually works. While Thunderbird (and dare I say, Outlook Express) both support basic contact management, they still don’t hold a candle to full fledged PIMs like Outlook. Kurlo bridges the gap, giving you all the contact management you’ll ever need and making it portable on a USB keychain drive. Manage full contact info, get birthday reminders, receive event notifications and manage group lists all within Kurlo’s interface. The only downside is it doesn’t sync with cell phones.

SimpleOCR – Call it the hack for getting around the DRM that is paper; optical character recognition is one of the most useful reasons to own a scanner. From manipulating old printed materials to quoting passages from some long forgotten text, SimpleOCR is among the best free OCR solutions I’ve ever tried.

Stickies – Post-it style notes don’t really fit the Getting Things Done mold, but I can’t live without them. When I need to jot something down for future completion, a paper note or a digital equivalent is a must. Stickies replaces all those notes stuck to the side of your monitor with a digital version on your desktop, complete with live URLs, custom fonts and color-coded backgrounds.

WinMerge – Merge text files, difference two documents or simply compare the contents to discover similarities. WinMerge is a great solution for combining files to make the sum greater than its parts.