After working in the ‘analyst’ field for a while now I have come accross a lot of tools which can be helpful to squeezing that extra piece of data out or creating a whiz bang report. Here is a list of free tools which should help you along the way!

Here is a summarized list of the products below:

MWSnap

Documentation and training documents can get tedious when you need to provide screen shots of examples. MWSnap is the best tool out there for all your screen capturing needs! With hot keys and drag and drop capture areas - this is definitely the holy grail of screen capturing tools.

MWSnap’s last release was way back in 2002 but this works perfectly with XP (it isn’t 100% in Vista though).

Paint.NET

An answer to a free Adobe Photoshop! When trying to create custom images or touch up any images Paint.NET is a great free application, it contains lots of filters and plug ins and is supported on XP and Vista!

SQL Developer

A product from Oracle, SQL Developer can support Access, MySQL, SQL Server with Querying and Data Extraction. The great thing about this tool is that it also includes a Query Builder option for all the novice SQL programmers. SQL Developer can be installed on XP, Vista, OS X and Linux.

PSPad

PSPad supports multiple coding languages and can edit anything and everything, it also has a great inbuilt FTP client. This is great for opening those large text and CSV data dumps! Runs on both XP and Vista.

R Project

For all your statistical minded folks this is a great open source tool for performing basic to advanced statistical analysis and supports numerous community created plug ins. I have now replaced SPSS with this tool! Runs on Linux, OS X, XP and Vista.

If you have any other free software that helps you as an analyst comment them!

Enjoy!