Free tools to tackle almost any task, from data wrangling to photo editing

By Chelsea Sheasley
@csheasley

What’s the best thing a reporter can tell their editor about new data tools? They’re F-R-E-E.

Anthony DeBarros, senior database editor at USA Today and Matt Stiles of NPR’s news applications team shared their top picks for the latest free tools at IRE 2012’s "Free tools panel."

“Free can be very, very good,” DeBarros said. “Sometimes it can be not so good because sometimes you get what you paid for.” Both speakers said the programs can be buggy, but many are also extremely powerful and offer essential data analysis tools.

DeBarros and Stiles’ broke out their top picks by category:

Text editing:

• Notepad ++
• Vim

Microsoft Office-like productivity:

• Libreoffice.org

Data wrangling (altering formats):

• Mr. Data Converter
• Mr. People
• Google Refine

Audio editing

• Audacity

Photo editing

• Gimp
• F-Spot

Video editing

• Open Movie Editor

Database managers

• SQLite
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• SQL Server Express

Data visualization

• Google Docs
• Tableau Public
• Many Eyes

Mapping

• MapBox/TileMill
• QGIS
• Fusion Tables

For a full list of DeBarros & Stiles’ recommendations, see the slides from their presentation. 

Chelsea Sheasley is a graduate student at Boston University College of Communication.