The world of business is a tough one indeed. Anyone will tell you that. From the guys at the top earning billions per year to the lowly freelancer, tucked away in a small home office. The big jobs are often the easiest. There’s nothing like landing a huge contract or finishing off that job you know will earn you more work. The small things however like administration and document control are annoying.

For all the small business owners, and indeed the tech geeks who just love new apps to play around with; here are three great online office apps that will help you reduce all of that paperwork.

Online OCR

This tool will take care of a lot of boring transcription that we all have to do now and again. I often find myself transcribing accounts and business plans into a text editor when I really should be using this tool.

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If you have yet to connect your Nintendo Wii to the Internet, you’re definitely missing out on a lot the console has to offer.

Utilizing the Wii’s built-in 802.11b/g Wi-Fi or connecting through a USB-to-Ethernet adapter, you can gain access to the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service. From there, a slew of great online connectivity features are available, including the Virtual Console for downloading games, Friend Codes for connecting with other players, WiiConnect24 to stay connected to the Internet while on standby, and various channels like Forecast for weather reports and News for current headlines.

All that and much more is up for grabs, but first you’ll have to get your Wii online. With access to your broadband connection, there are currently two ways to connect the console to the Internet: through a wireless router or a wired access point using the Wii LAN Adapter.

Ready to get more out of your Nintendo console? Let’s get right to it and find out how to connect your Wii to the Internet.

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That’s true…articles from 650 magazines for you to read. But instead of flipping the pages, you will have to click the mouse at Maggwire.

Who reads magazines these days? Plenty of people, I would say. My mother is one of them because the digital world is still like a mystic’s ball to her. Me? For me the differentiation doesn’t really exist because what I read is mostly spewed out by the search engines, RSS feeds and bookmarked portals and blogs. Content rules, and the web we all would agree, is full of it.

But I do pick up the occasional magazine at the airport or while on a long drive. Some memories die hard and knowledge picked up from old favorites like Reader’s Digest (upfront) and Cosmopolitan (on the sly) still holds good.

Magazine articles are written by top-notchers, usually with weeks of research and editorial pen drills. Rich in content and relevancy, there’s a lot that goes into making those articles grab our eyeballs. It is only the cost factor and decreasing advertising revenues that’s pushing magazine publishing off the racks. But the digital juggernaut still hasn’t achieved world dominance.

Maggwire (beta) is an online destination for those who are interested in free online magazines. You may subscribe to a few, but it’s impossible that you can read them all. Maggwire brings to you popular content from 650 magazines around the world. Articles from these many magazines are arranged according to the categories they represent and it is across the board. From world news to bridal stories you will find it all.

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A lot of old-school writers and producers still use the familiar pen and paper. Others have migrated to the digital world and are using Open Office or MS Word.

Personally I’ve never felt quite at home in Word to write a story. Instead, I’ve always been using creative writing suites or pre-production packages.

That’s right, there is screenwriting software that’s specifically designed to help you formulate ideas and work in a simple, but flexible creative environment.

Celtx

I’ve written an article about yWriter in the past, a tool that would help you with outlining and working on your stories. A creative writing suite, if you will. Celtx is different. Oh sure, Celtx will be able to help you with your creative writing, but it’ll do so much more.

Celtx is screenwriting software that aims to aid in all media pre-production. So what does this mean? Whether you’re working on a novel, a film, a comic, a radio or podcast broadcasting, or even a video game, Celtx will help you put down those ideas and help you plan them in a quick and efficient manner.

With all types of features and support, you won’t have to jump over and through between five different screenwriting software applications anymore (if you even used any). Everything can be written, planned and colaborated from within Celtx.

Below we’ll take a look at some of the most prominent features in the application. Believe me, if you’re in the creative business, this is one application you’ll want to add to your arsenal.

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Now you can tag your friends and all other people in your Flickr photos. This may sound familiar from other services like Facebook. It took Flickr a while to implement the feature, but as you’d expect, they really made the Flickr tags work well. Especially the way you have control over where you show up yourself is handled well.

I think this might sound convenient to some of you who have suddenly shown up on Facebook on that photo some kid made at a party where you tried to set the world record for beer bong drinking. Ouch. As you know there are too many examples of people getting busted calling in sick for work. But Flickr has implemented this well and it could be a really nice tool. Both for organizing your own photos and the people who are in them and finding other people’s photos you are in.

So how does this work? The new feature is called People in Photos and it lets you add any Flickr member to a photo. But it’s also possible to highlight people who are not registered on Flickr, although they have to give their permission by email. You tag someone on the photo by typing in their name, just like you would with a Flickr tag for the photo. For Flickr users who are familiar with notes, it should be easy to draw a face boundary on the photo.

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I downloaded this 4.9MB file from Google Code. QMMander is a free open source Windows Explorer alternative and it is pretty cool. It gives you a dual pane experience to relieve you from the pain of having to open two Explorer windows to drag and drop files between.

But that’s not all – no sir re bob! QMMAnder is not a one hit wonder! You can also have two separate listing types going on at the same time. Qmmander is written in C++ and uses Qt, a cross-platform application and GUI framework from Nokia. The Google Code page says that the application is buggy but I have not run into any issues yet.

You can have one window preview showing a detail listing so you can sort by file size, while in the right pane you have big icons so you can easily recognize the file icons you are looking for. The software is also portable and can (should) be run from a USB or thumb drive.

A person’s Explorer tells a lot about them. If you are using the built in Windows Explorer it shows that you do not like to tweak but if you are using something like this – it shows you think outside the box. That’s not just because I am a geek right?

Let’s see what QMMAnder can do! When you first launch the application you will be seeing double – the same thing on both sides, as you can see below:

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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) DeadCellZones – Consumer generated map of locations with cellphone coverage problems. It maps over 100,000 cell phone complaints submitted by customers of major cellphone carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, Nextel, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless… etc. The site comes in handy if you want to find out which cellphone carrier provides the best cellphone coverage in your area. Read more: DeadCellZones – Find A Carrier With The Best Cellphone Coverage in Area

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I was thinking the other day about Twitter (check out MakeUseOf’s Twitter: Best Practices and Tips [PDF Guide]) and whether or not it would be possible to have more than one person tweeting from one account.  There could be several uses for such a thing.

First off, a company could want multiple users on one Twitter account in order to share from different departments, etc. or to just split the time it would take to run a successful company Twitter account.  A ministry may want multiple users on one Twitter account, too, to help communicate with the world about what’s going on.  MAYBE a multi-writer blog would want each of the writers to contribute tweets so their Twitter stream remains active.  There could be MANY reasons for what I call a “muli-twit” Twitter account.

There are several issues that could arise from assigning multiple users on Twitter accounts.  A company or organization may have hesitations about relinquishing access to employees.  There should be some kind of control over an organization’s brand.  You’d probably want specific people or a specific department in control of PR or public relations.  It only makes sense that those same people (or that same department) should be in control of what goes out in a company Twitter stream.  So, how can we reconcile the need for a “multi-twit” Twitter account and the PR nightmare it could impose?  Check out TweetFunnel (free while in beta)!

I like how TweetFunnel works.  In fact it reminds me of how a multi-author blog operates.  Basically TweetFunnel allows you to have three levels of twits: an Administrator, a publisher, and a contributor. The administrator creates the account and has the abilities to create users and review and publish tweets. The publisher can review and, you guessed it, publish tweets.  And then there’s the contributor who only had the ability to write and submit tweets to the administrator or publisher for approval.

A publisher or Administrator has several options to choose from when a tweet is submitted by a contributor: approve and post, approve and schedule the tweet to be posted at a later time, hold until later posting or scheduling, or outright reject the tweet.
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As many of the regular MakeUseOf readers will know, I tend to do a good few posts about cell phones and cell phone applications such as How to Use Your GPRS Cell Phone as a Modem or my Snaptu article.

In both of these articles, I described connecting your cell phone to your PC via USB cable. However, there is another way; Bluetooth. This will work in precisely the same was as a USB cable in terms of transferring data but it eliminates the need for a cable (I’m told many budget phones are being shipped without USB cables).

You’ll need two things for this to work:

1. A Bluetooth-enabled computer. Most laptops now have Bluetooth and so do some desktops. If yours doesn’t, you can buy a USB Bluetooth adapter cheaply on sites such as EBay.
2. A Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone.

Go to Control Panel under the Start Menu and look for ‘Bluetooth devices’ as pictured in the screenshot. If you’re using Vista, select classic view to display all of  the icons. Click on the Bluetooth icon. The window below should open.

Click ‘Add Wireless Device’ as seen in the screenshot. Before scanning for devices – turn on Bluetooth on your cell phone.
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Today’s Question Of The Day is one that was posed by Ryan in our internal email discussion group and we would now like to throw the question out to our readers.

When reading RSS feeds, do you prefer to see the full post inside your RSS reader or do you just want to see an excerpt?   Why is one better than the other?

Let us know in the comments what you prefer!