Themed templates. In this post, I covered Hewlett-Packard’s extensive collection of freely downloadable business document templates. They come in “Business Identity Kits,” which allow you to streamline how flyers, brochures, business cards and other documents look, using common themes. Additionally, if you use Microsoft Office, you can get free themed document templates from Microsoft.

Web design templates. Open Source Web Designs is an excellent first stop if you’re looking for eye-catching web site templates. The available designs have user ratings and comments, too.

A free desktop publisher. If you are going to build documents, brochures and other materials from the ground up, and you don’t happen to have a solid desktop publishing program, look into Scribus. It’s a free, open source desktop publishing solution available for Windows and the Mac, and it has most of the bells and whistles you need to produce attractive documents. I have found it especially useful for producing booklets and brochures, because it has pre-built templates that you can just insert your graphics and text into.

OpenOffice templates. Even if you don’t use the open source productivity suite OpenOffice on a regular basis, you can download it for free for Windows, the Mac or Linux. You can download many OpenOffice business document templates here; you don’t need to be an expert in using the applications to customize and print the templates.

Clip art, photos and images you can use without worries. Images and photos can spruce up most any document you create. You can find a large collection of free clip art from Microsoft here. For photos that you can drop into blog posts and documents without copyright worries, I recommend using CompFight. The site allows you to cycle through various types of Creative Commons licenses available for photos on Flickr, so that you can choose photos that you can reproduce without fear of infringing anyone’s copyright (although in most cases, you should supply a photo credit and mention the license used).

Fast, professional invoices. For freelancers and remote workers, invoices are some of the most frequently sent documents. In this WebWorkerDaily post, you’ll find several good choices for producing professional-looking invoices online.

Where do you turn for professional-looking templates?

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Dimdim for Online Meetings. Dimdim is widely regarded for its ability to host online meetings including up to 20 people–for free. The latest  version of this free, open source application added many new features including letting you record your meetings and share playback URLs.

The recording feature in Dimdim is not found in most other popular freeware online meeting applicatons, such as Yugma (although I remain a big fan of Yugma). Many of the freeware online meeting applications also limit you to only 10 concurrent participants at one time. Mac, Windows and Linux users can use Dimdim.

AbiWord for an Alternative Word Processor. AbiWord is one of my favorite free, open source applications. I wrote a review of the newest version over on the OStatic blog.

AbiWord is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It has a much lighter footprint than other word processors, and if you’re used to using Microsoft Word you’ll feel particularly at home but appreciate how light and fast AbiWord is. If you work on a cross-platform basis with other web workers, it’s also a good choice, and supports all essential file formats.

Scribus, for Flexible Desktop Publishing. Scribus is a very respected free and open source desktop publishing application, which I wrote up previously here. This is a great application to reach for when you want to do logos, booklets, brochures, and other prettier-than-usual documents.

On Scribus’ site, you can find links to many extensions and add-ons that add value to the core program. Scribus is also good for PDF creation, You won’t find quite the number of features found in proprietary applications such as InDesign, but for most common desktop publishing tasks, Scribus gets the job done well.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks