File2.ws allows us to convert almost any type of file into an HTML webpage with zero knowledge necessary in any web language or programming skills. This is awesome for someone to share a document or song with the world or a group of people.
If you get a email with a Word document attachment all you have to do is upload it to File2.ws and it will convert a file to HTML and shoot back the link.
Let’s check out how it works.
You start off by visiting their website. You will see a page that looks like this:
All it takes to create a web page is to point that browse box to your local file and let it upload to their server. You can convert the following file types:
- image/photo files (jpeg, gif, png, svg…)
- audio formats (mp3, ogg…)
- documents (doc, pdf, odt, txt, rtf, ppt…)
- programming source code (java, php, cpp…)
- web documents (html, htm, swf…)
- archive (zip, rar, tar…)
- video, fonts, chemical file formats and more
How awesome is that? I started with a Word document that was formatted and included highlighting. Let’s see how it was handled. Hit browse and find your file. Then hit open.
You will see the filename filled into the box. There is a 15MB file max then hit the start conversion button. The file will upload to their site and the rest of the process is automatic.
Once your file has been successfully transferred to their site you will see a success screen with a link to your new webpage containing your document’s contents.
If you click on the link it will take you to the page. It should appear identical to your original with the exception of the Adsense or Bidvertiser ads at the top of your document directly under your title.
Next up let’s upload a MP3 and see how that handles. I threw it a old “Tribe Called Quest” song called Start it up. It took longer to upload then the Word document that’s for sure. It took about 11 minutes to upload but then the track came back embedded into a website. Fearing copyright infringement I will not post the link to the track but here is the link to my Word document that contains no sensitive data.
I can think of hundreds of users for this free website including showing a client a proof, showing a document, Excel sheet, Powerpoint document, home movies…. I mean the possibilities are endless. the site goes on to talk about its features. I figured I would post them up so you can see them as well:
- Fastest download speeds
- No download limits
- No CAPTCHA codes
- Multiple simultaneous downloads and uploads
- Unlimited page bandwidth
- No sign up required
- No software to install
- Link directly to the generated web page
I can say the download speeds are WAY better than the upload speeds but what we here at Make Use Of LOVE is the no signup and software to install. This makes this site very versatile.
Do you have a similar application that you use? We would love to hear about it? Maybe you have some creative uses for this service? Leave them in the comments and don’t worry you won’t be judged (maybe a little!)
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this will come in very handy. handy indeed. thanks Karl. :D
Well, I think it’s pretty pointless that the word file comes out as an image! There is no formatting if all it does is make it into an image….
If you need to be able to copy the text just use a txt file instead of word.
I would like to expand on Mr Drakulich’s comment.
I just tried converting an MS Word document using this service. What the service did was to capture the _appearance_ of the document’s contents as a series of image files and then to produce an HTML file which presents these image files so that the whole thing looks like the original Word document.
This might be alright for some purposes. However, what many of us actually want is a service that converts the text and markup in a Word document into text and HTML markup. Usually we want to be able to modify the markup.
I’d like a pony too.
Seriously, some people will complain about anything. For what it offers, i.e. a quick, free, painless, free, easy, free way to convert a file to a posting on the web, it appears to do the job very well.
I can see this having many uses in education. I will add it to my blog as a useful tool for staff collaboration or posting student work.
When I upload a Microsoft Word file with .docx extension it just shows the download link, not an image of the document as with .doc files.
Probably that kind of file isn’t supported at this time, but good tool anyway.
thx will check this out
Hey firstly, thanks for creating this tool :)
I think some of the comments here highlight the need for a tool which converts normal computing documents, image’s etc into code which can be used on a website, in most cases for text documents this would be html markup. There must be another way to extract text and formatting from a word document and transfer this to html for the content and css for the formatting.
It just converted my 80k pdf into a 250k jpg, what’s the point of that? It’s not what I’d mean by “convert pdf to html”.
I expect (and usually get) better quality recommendations from MUO.