We have reviewed quite a few online storage services in the past. Microsoft’s offering Skydrive is right up there with others when it comes to storage space, offering a staggering 25 GB of online space. In addition we also showed you how you can edit your Office documents stored in Windows Live Skydrive with Office Webapps.

One of the most annoying aspects of nearly all online storage solutions is that you have to use a web browser to upload and manage files. Some of them offer Java applets to upload but there are a number of other operations that you may want to perform on the files you have in your account. Doing them in a web browser is generally not the best way to do such things. It would be nicer if you could integrate Skydrive into the Windows shell. Wouldn’t it?

Skydrive Explorer is one such application that lets you do just that. With Skydrive Explorer installed you can easily access your Skydrive account just like any other drive from inside My Computer. A meagre 1.23 MB download, Skydrive Explorer installs in a jiffy. Once installed you will see a Skydrive Explorer System folder listed inside My Computer.

Double click on it and you will be prompted to log into your Skydrive account. You can then view the contents of your Skydrive account just like any other folder without having to use the web browser.

You should note that folders may take some time to load since Skydrive Explorer needs to send a request and then process it before it can display the relevant information to you. You should therefore avoid working directly with files stored in your Skydrive folders. The right way would be create a local copy, edit it and then copy it back to Skydrive. That said, the performance is acceptable and a large part of it would be attributed to your connection speed.

Skydrive Explorer lets you perform almost all the file/folder management tasks that you can need:

• You can create, delete, rename multiple folders in a single go.

• Copy files to Skydrive folders from your hard drive which would then be uploaded to your Skydrive account or copy the contents to your hard drive from the account.

• You can also right click on any folder and then copy its URL to the clipboard. Visiting the URL in any web browser would take you to your Skydrive account, right to where the file is located. You can easily use this functionality to share files with others by adding them to the “Public” folder.
• Create shortcuts to a Skydrive folder on your desktop for quick access

With a little effort you can easily use Skydrive to backup your important files. You can use software like the previously mentioned Directorysync pro or Freefilesync to keep two folder synchronized with each other. Let’s say you synchronize the Documents folder on your Skydrive account with the Documents folder for your user account in Windows. Now changes to any file or folder will be automatically communicated to your Skydrive account – just keep in mind the 50MB file limit!

You can also have a look at previously mentioned Gladinet and see which one would you like to use in case you are looking for a way to access your Skydrive. Which is your favorite online storage service and how do you access it?

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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.

To put it bluntly, it takes a scanned image of a document or a PDF file and transforms it into an editable text document such as MS Word or MS Notepad (*.txt file). This service is free – to an extent. There is no registration required and you can convert five pages every hour as an unregistered user which is plenty for small business owners. For registered users, the first five pages are free but after that every page costs 10 cents. I’d imagine this is only for large businesses who would be scanning documents with hundreds of pages in a short period of time.

We have previously covered other OCR applications such as Varun’s review of JOCR and Saikat’s Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools.

Fill Any PDF

Many of us will have to fill in several forms when tax returns are due, insurance policies are required or indeed for business procedures. It’s common practice to receive those forms in PDF format either by e-mail or by downloading them and then printing them out to fill in by hand.

FillAnyPDF is an extremely easy-to-use online PDF form editor that allows you to fill in a PDF form using a text editor or freehand writing. What’s more, you can also create your own PDF forms and share them online with other people and request they fill them in using this editor.

Obviously security is a big issue when dealing with confidential forms online so FillAnyPDF gives you the option to ‘whiteout’ certain areas and only make those areas visible to the person the form is intended for. The last thing you need is somebody having access to your social security number and personal details.

We have discussed in the past various other options.   Ones that immediately spring to mind are Karl’s review of PDFVue and Jackson’s review of FormulatePro which is a Mac option.

WatchDox

As we touched on above, security is paramount concerning business documents. But you can’t exactly put a PDF in a briefcase and handcuff it to yourself. It’s impractical and sort of weird. Plus I’m sure every thief that sees you will definitely want that briefcase.

Anyway, this is a method of sharing pretty much any document online, in a secure environment with the intended recipients.

Here is how it works:

1. You upload the document, enter the recipients e-mail address and set the security measures on the document such as an expiration or curtain.
2. You add instructions for the recipient concerning the document (optional).
3. Then the recipient gets an e-mail with a link to the document.
4. They can view the document with registration or downloading anything.
5. He or she cannot copy or download the document without your direct permission.
6. Once the expiry date comes the document is destroyed and is no longer viewable online.

I think this is actually one of the best ways of sharing documents in business these days because, as governments and banks around the globe have shown us, CDs, e-mails and hard copy documents have a habit of going missing along with tonnes of valuable information.

Hopefully these three tools will make your office life flow a little smoother.  Which office apps do you use regularly?

Image Credit : foundphotoslj

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We have covered a lot of MS Word 2007 tips and tricks and how-to’s over the months and we have seen how the Office application can be used to create interesting documents. With decreasing attention spans and more hurried reading, designing documents for easy readability has become very important. People don’t read — they glance through. If it’s not your grandmother bequeathing you all her worldly possessions, I guess you too would prefer a rapid scan through a document instead of going at it by line.

Bullets are an essential tool for creating concise documents. You can capture the essential gist of a document in a bulleted list (or a numbered list for that matter).

When I was starting out with MS Word, I knew of only those that I got from the toolbar, with a click on Bullets and Numbering. As MS Word graduated to MS Word 2007, one colorful option came in. A few more days spent spraying bullets all over a document and I learned that there’s an entire gallery of bullets that can be used for improving the décor of one’s document. Not only that, I can use symbols and my own custom pictures too to create my own bullets.

So let’s take a look at the different ways in which we can create bullets. Of course, these are common across all MS Office applications.

Define your own bullet with symbols

MS Word makes it real easy to customize our own bullets if we don’t like the default ones.

• On the Home tab of the Ribbon, go to the Paragraph group where the Bullets command is located. Click the little drop down arrow to access the default bullets in the Bullets Library. Click on Define New Bullets.

  

• Next, click on Symbol and select any character you like to get a new bullet. You can select Wingdings, Wingdings 2 and Webdings from the Fonts dropdown to access a rich variety of typefaces as bullets. You can see a small preview too. Click on OK to set your new choice of bullet.

  

• Just like a font, you can change the color and size of a bullet.

  

Define your own bullets with pictures

• Alternatively, you can click on Picture in the Define New Bullet box to select any from the large gallery. You can also put a check on Include Content from Office Online.

  

• Click on Import to browse to an external file and include it in the collection.
• A lot of the picture bullets can be found under – (In Windows XP) C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Media\Office12\Bullets.
• In the above location, you will see that the GIF files have average dimensions of 15 pixels. You can make your own customized picture bullets using the same dimensions in any graphic application.

  

Shortcut bullets with AutoCorrect

• The AutoCorrect feature of Word allows you to create fast bullets with some special characters. To see whether AutoCorrect is set for automatically creating bulleted lists, go to: Office – Word Options – Proofing – Click on AutoCorrect Options.

  

• In the AutoFormat as You Type tab, check Automatic Bulleted Lists.

  

• AutoCorrect recognizes any of these characters…
  *
  o
  — (em dash)
  –
  ––
  >
  –>
  =>
  …and changes them to bullets on the run when you press Enter. Type in any of these characters, press Spacebar, or a tab to enter the text for that line. Hit Enter to go to the next line as the bulleted list gets created with each press of an Enter.
• Creating bulleted lists with AutoCorrect works with all kinds of bullets like symbols and pictures.

Steal bullets from open documents

• If you get a document with a bullet you like, you can easily copy it into your collection. Bullets in an open document get added to the bullets collection under the group – Document Bullets. Select the bullet in that group, right click and Add to Library. Now, it’s yours’ to own and use.

  

• You can remove them by selecting them in the Library group and right clicking on Remove.

Composing bulleted lists is often harped upon these days. Don’t you think that attractive bulleted lists will help with more eye-catching points?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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There are a lot of things which can go into creating a professional looking document. But when we are talking about first impressions, then we have to speak about the first thing that catches the eye and that’s the cover page.

The cover page is the very first page of your document. Its purpose right at the beginning is to give the reader the Big Idea about the document. The why and wherefore is communicated through a specific title, the author name, date, a one-liner on the subject and any other bit of important information on the cover page.

If Black Text On A White Page Is A Turn Off…

One of the reasons I am writing this post is that Microsoft Word makes it painless to create a professional cover page. Unlike the previous versions, Word 2007 has Building Blocks which are pre-formatted templates for cover pages, headers, footers etc. Learning how to make a cover page in MS Word is as easy as a few clicks.

So let’s move away from the monochromatic black on white to more colorful beginnings.

1. Open MS Word 2007 in a new document or the document you wish to create the cover page for.
2. Click on the Insert menu on the ribbon. The very first section, Pages contains the dropdown for Cover Page. Click on Cover Page to open the inbuilt gallery of templates.



3. The inbuilt gallery has about 15 pre-formatted cover pages that you can scroll though. Click on the one you like to select and open it. The cover page appears at the beginning of the document by default.



4. If you want it in any other location, right click on the cover page thumbnail in the gallery and select from the options given.



5. Now, you can click on each pre-formatted field (the square brackets) and the whole thing gets highlighted with a blue field label on top. Type in your version for the given field. The author name might appear by default if the Office installation was in your name.



6. For date fields, you can click the dropdown arrow to select a date from a calendar. You can format all fields as you would for normal text.



7. Building blocks have editable regions which can be customized again. For instance, some of the cover page templates use tables which again can be formatted for size and color of borders or fills using Word’s table tools. Also, some templates have pictures which can be swapped for another or formatted. Think a logo would go better with the page? Just right click on the picture and click Change Picture in the context menu.



8. While working on one cover page, you can change it for another cover page by selecting a new template from the dropdown. The field entries are retained in the new template.
9. Click on Save to finalize the cover page as a document.
10. If you would like to save the cover page for later use in another document, select the entire cover page. Click on Insert – Cover Page – Save Selection to Cover Page Gallery. You can use the same menu to remove a selected cover page from the gallery.

Adding a cover page to a document not only helps in stylizing it but it also gives a sketch to the reader about the contents. You can create a generic cover page for your company and save it in the gallery for frequent use. Another use is to create a document in Word with a nicely laid out cover page and save it in PDF. It can add oodles to the way you present your document (and you don’t have to have any designing IQ).

If a book can be known by its cover, so should a document. Most of us don’t commonly employ a cover page with a document. Or do you? Let us know the benefits you find in inserting a well designed cover page.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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One of the alternatives that we could use to create documents on a Mac is Apple’s Pages, part of iWork’s suite of productivity applications along with Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentation). The suite is tagged at US$79 and available for 30-day free trial. While the price is far less Microsoft Office suite, paid is still paid. But I think Pages has great features that’s worth the look, even it’s only during the free trial.

The Power of Templates

At the most basic level, Pages is a word processor. So you can use it for your everyday word processing activities from creating a document, writing and editing the text, importing other elements like charts and pictures, to printing or saving the document as a PDF.

Pages can also open documents from many other formats including Microsoft Word documents. Your work from other computers under any other OS can be resumed on your Mac using Pages. The same thing goes for the other end, Pages can also save your work as Word documents. To reveal more saving options, click the little arrow beside the name field when you save your work.

But the true power of this app lies in its beautifully pre-designed templates. Users can use these templates to quickly create professionally looking documents. As Apple puts it, “Even before you start writing, your document looks great.” This template-based method is also used by iWeb, Apple’s webpage design application.

There are over 180 templates for you to choose from, divided into two categories: Word Processing (work-related kind of documents) and Page Layout (more to the ‘fun’ type of documents).

From the Word Processing category, there are Letters, Envelopes, Forms, Resumes, Reports, and Outlines; while from the Page Layout category, there are Newsletters, Brochures, Flyers, Posters, Cards & Invitations, Business Cards, and Certificates. Both categories also offer blank documents and miscellaneous templates.

You can add your own templates and they will appear in “My Templates”.

Creating a good looking document using Templates

My first encounter with Pages was when my friend asked me to help him create a class newsletter. He was amazed at the stunning result that we produced in a short time.

And the process of creating that document required no rocket science. Here are the simple steps for creating good looking documents using Pages’ templates:

1. Open Pages and create a new document.

2. Choose a template

3. Edit the text and replace the pictures

4. Add as many pages as you need

5. Don’t forget to save your document after you’ve done.

Each template listed in the Template Chooser comes with several types of documents and each document consists of several types of pages. Playing with the combinations will provide you with a large number of choices and could keep you busy – in a fun way – for quite a while.

But if you think that the pre-designed templates are not enough, you could add more templates – free or paid – from the internet. One of the recommended places to get free templates is iWorkCommunity.

You could just open the downloaded templates, but if you want them to appear in Pages template list, you should put them inside this folder:

~/UserFolder/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/FolderName

Creating your own templates

But why stop at using templates from others? If you think you have an artistic side that you could be proud of, or if you think that you will consistently use a series of layouts over and over in your project, you could create your own templates, either for personal use or to be shared with others.

You could start building your template from a scratch by opening a totally blank page or you could also do it by modifying another template.

If you are starting from naught, you’d want to add elements to your documents like text boxes, and shapes. This can be done by going to the “Insert” menu or by clicking the icon in the toolbar.

To fill in the text boxes, you could generate some “Lorem Ipsum”s from Lipsum Generator.

To add pictures, open Media Browser from the View –> Show Media Browser or by clicking the toolbar icon.

Then insert some pictures by dragging and dropping the items from media browser to document.

Every element of the page can be edited by selecting it and open the Inspector (View –> Show Inspector or Command + Option + I or the Inspector toolbar icon).

Add more pages according to your needs and repeat the steps.

Once the layout process is finished, you should enable every element of the page(s) as a placeholder. This way, you are able to customize those elements later when you use the pages you’ve created as template.

To do this, go to “Format –> Advanced –> Enable Placeholder Text Authoring” menu. Then select the text and choose “Format –> Advanced –> Define As Placeholder Text”.

To do the same with images, click on the item but choose “Format –> Advanced –> Define As Image Placeholder” instead.

The final step is to turn your document into template. Choose the thumbnail of a page and go to “Format –> Advanced –> Capture Pages” menu.

And name the page.

Repeat the process to other pages.

You could manage multiple pages in a template from “Format –> Advanced –> Manage Pages” menu.

Then use the arrows to rearrange the order and the minus (-) button to delete the pages that you don’t need.

If you want to share your creations, they are available in the same location as your other imported templates: ~/UserFolder/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/

So far I haven’t found any free Mac alternatives for template-based word processors similar to Pages. But if you know any, share using the comment below.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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How do you convert that PDF to text? You could print it and try and scan it back into your machine using a free OCR software or you could grab this awesome little application called PDF Text Extractor.

We have covered several applications for retrieving data from the confines of a PDF document but this application concentrates on the text. If that is what you need – your text and nothing but the text – then this is the program for you.

Let’s take a look at it and how it can convert a PDF to text.

I started by downloading and installing the program. It was a quick process and the MSI installer file was about 1.13 megabytes. When I ran the application this is what I saw:

This is a really easy layout and graphical user interface – simply select the PDF you would like to convert to plain text. Then you select the folder you want the converted plain text file written to. You can type in a full path for each or hit the button next to the blank field to browse.

When you are ready your window will look something like this:

Now our PDF document that contained our text – the text that we need to reformat and put into a manual is in a file. That file looks like this before we begin:

7 full pages of text, text and more text. That would be a lot of typing for poor Betty our departments secretary. So I went Googling and found our little application. I fired it up and hit that magic convert button. Literally it took 2 seconds and then a window popped up that said it was complete:

I went looking in my d:\ drive for the file. I actually realized I had no idea what it was called or what the extension would be. I sorted the files by date created and found what i was looking for:

I opened the text file up and as you can see above the files name seems to always be TextFile.txt. The contents of the text file were just that….all of the text that I needed! Yeah!

This is what I saw:

My formatting was not 100% there but all of the glorious text was and now it is a just a matter of copying, pasting and formatting. Nowhere near as big of a job as it was before! And we do not need Adobe Acrobat Reader, Writer or any other nonsense on our machine. Just this little application and a PDF file. You can open the text file in Word, Notepad++, Wordpad or whatever your favorite editor is.

How do you extract text from a PDF? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

Download: Text Extractor

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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One innovation over the last couple of years has been the e-reader, which should solve some of the problems of reading off the computer screen. While these look very promising to me, they’re still in the early stages of adoption and above all, they are still quite expensive. And many of you already carry around a perfectly good e-reader substitute in your pocket, in the form of an iPhone or an iPod Touch. I’ve been using my iPod Touch and I’ll tell you how to read documents such as PDFs or even MS Word documents on your iPhone’s native apps as well as a third party application.

Using your email

The easiest way (and quite usable) to read pdf files on your iPhone is to email yourself the PDF as an attachment. This is simple and you don’t need to install any app to do this. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to organize your emails in folders, so it really is best used for something simple to read. It does have a way to read in landscape mode. It works for MS Word, MS Excel files and most images. The attachments are saved on your device after loading them once so you don’t need a connection the next time you want to read it.

Using Files lite

Files lite is actually the best free app to read documents and PDF files on the iPhone or iPod touch. You create a virtual folder on your computer into which you drag and drop the files you want to read. You can create folders in the application or the virtual folder, so it’s easy to manage a lot of books and articles. I tested this on Windows 7 but it should also work on other version of Windows, Mac and even Linux. I’ll quickly show you how to set it up so you’ll have an idea of how easy it is. The app also comes with a good guide too.

1. Download the app.
2. Setup a network folder using WebDAV. It’s very easy and can be read about in their tutorial.
3. You can setup subfolders in the application or on your computer.
4. Now drag your files to the network folder, make sure that your iPhone is connected to the same Wifi network.

It’s that easy. Now you can carry around your documents and read them wherever you go, without having dying forests on your conscience. And you read it correctly, you don’t need any cables to synchronize the documents. If only iTunes would work that easy when syncing your music!

Alternatives

There are many apps in the App Store that can perform similarly to Files lite, but that you have to pay for. One restriction of Files lite is that you only have 200 MB available to play around with on your iPhone, but that can hold many PDF files. The other apps differ from each other mostly in the way you transfer files, such as over the air, via USB, FTP or downloading from a web address. A good paid app is Good Reader ($0.99) and another is Stanza (free), which is more a complete e-reader which has a PC suite to manage your books and the possibility to download many free e-books.

Do you find reading from your iPhone as comfortable as reading from paper? If you like the e-reader apps, then you don’t really have an excuse to not read your articles and books.

Image credit: nxb

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With the case of MS Word documents, usually it’s right before we press the save button. Bang! All that unsaved hard work goes down as lost bytes. But for a failsafe device built into MS Word.

AutoRecover is the supposedly goof-proof mechanism that can get back our documents after an accidental closure. By default, MS Word 2007 makes an automatic file save every 10 minutes. I am an average Joe, but there are times when I can get a lot done in 10 minutes. Sometimes, I am an average dunce too because I forget to continuously save the work. That’s why the need to pay closer attention to the AutoRecover setting makes for good foresightedness.

AutoRecover is not a productivity substitute for the normal save operation. Saving our files consistently and continuously is a best practice.

AutoRecover to the rescue

1. Following a crash or an abnormal close of a document, the Document Recovery Task Pane appears with a prompt when Word is restarted.



2. The pane on the left hand side lists the files (usually three of the most recent) that Word managed to recover.



3. The file name is qualified by a status indicator which gives an idea of the stage of recovery. Original indicates that the file is the same as was during the last manual save. Autosaved indicates that the file has managed to recover data between the last manual save and up to the last AutoRecover process.
4. With the Document Recovery Task Pane, you can open and check the files for lost content. Save the most recent version (or all of them) and delete the rest.

Where are the auto-recovered backups stored?

1. By default the files are placed as temporary files here (Windows XP) - C:\Documents and Settings\[User]\Application Data\Microsoft\Word. The files have the extension ASD (Word Automatic Backup).
2. The AutoRecover location can be modified by providing an alternate folder location. Click on the Office button – Word Options – Advanced – Scroll down to the General section on the right hand pane – Click on File Locations – Modify the location for AutoRecover under File Types by assigning a different folder.

Insure your documents by changing the AutoRecover interval

As mentioned before, MS Word normally auto-saves a document every 10 minutes. Is it too much for you or is it too less? A few steps into Word’s settings and you can change the interval to your liking. If you are the forgetful sort, a more frequent auto-save could be the pill.

1. Start with the Office button.
2. Click on Word Options. Go to Save found on the left hand column. For the section Save Documents, come to the entry – Save AutoRecover information every X minutes.



3. Change the time interval to your liking. Every 5 minutes should be just fine.

AutoRecover consumes resources, so too frequent an interval could hit performance.

Microsoft Office Suite has the AutoRecover option enabled for Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Visio and Word. In OneNote, a five second auto-save is the default (That’s why it does not have a Save button.)

In a perfect world the practice of save early and save would be followed to the letter. Unfortunately, our world isn’t one. That’s why the AutoRecover option does its best to safeguard our hard work.

Is your auto-recovery set to the default? How often has it brought you back from the brink?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Although these tools are highly similar in concept, they show differences in overall functionality and abilities. Today we’ll review the most prominent of these sites for you, so you may find the one that ultimately fits your every need. Here they are, in no specific order.

Issuu

What Issuu currently lacks in word of mouth, it makes up for in raw style. You won’t encounter anytime soon a more beautiful and fine-tuned site to publish PDFs online than Issuu – especially graphically. With slick looks, this player will continue to conquer the hearts of many nerds.

You can browse Issuu’s ‘collection’ based on category, rating and overall popularity. The level of Issuu content is very high, and you’ll encounter many professional magazine publications. If you’re looking for a good eBook read, Issuu can help you a long way.

In terms of interface, Issuu heads a more experimental path. Away with the well-known PDF reading set-up, hello eye-candy intuitive experimentation. Issuu allows you to read your PDFs like a real magazine, two by two. You can click the page to zoom in and have a more detailed view. Intuitively flip the pages, or use the OSX-doc-like index at the bottom of the page.

The design, as well as the revolutionary interface makes Issuu my new personal favourite.

Check out a MakeUseOf PDF example on Issuu here.

Scribd

If Issuu is my ‘new’ personal favourite, whose throne did it take? Reader, meet Scribd, another wonderful PDF publishing site. If you think Issuu is too much mumbo-jumbo, this might be what you’re looking for to publish PDFs online.

The Scribd online reader once again deviates from the conventional interface – although not as extreme. Scribd also allows you to read your PDFs per page, or in a two-by-two ‘book’ format. The ’scroll’ view is the more interesting part of the interface. Simply move your mouse towards the bottom of the page and click to gently scroll down your page. Although you can summon a graphical index of pages, this mode is more aimed to userswho are off to read instead of scan the documents, and makes a great interface for reading eBooks.

Last month we used Scribd to promote the online viewing of one of our MakeUseOf manuals – The iPhone Guide. The pilot proved a success, with the document even making the Scribd hotlist. Check out a MakeUseOf PDF example on Scribd here.

Google Docs

Google Docs – for those of you who’ve been living under a rock in the past few years – is the cloud computing office application by internet and software giant Google. This free and online suite covers all bases – word processing, spreadsheets, and so on. Not everyone knows this, but besides functionality for txt and doc files, Google Docs perfectly integrates with PDF files.

Strictly following the definition we gave at the start of the article, this site might not be allowed a place in this list. However, because Google Docs allows you to not only ‘view’ your PDF files, but also gives you a (1.0) platform for spreading them, I personally think it should be given the benefit of the doubt.

Alas, a 2.0 platform is not included, but the basic functionality for this application allows you to pretty much do what you want with it – upload your files and make them public. Next, you can share the link with pretty much everyone you know. Embedding the document is sadly not possible. Incredibly simple and easy to use, albeit limited in functionality.

Check out a MakeUseOf PDF example on Google Docs here.

Have you ever published a PDF online? It’s easier than you think! Tell us which site(s) you used and why you did(n’t) like them in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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• 3 Websites To View Your PDFs Online (13)

The one downside of a PDF is that you’ll need a PDF reader. Sure, there are some great free applications out there, but it’s yet another install – especially if you’re not on your own computer.

More and more services are developed to let you view PDFs online in your browser. With all the code on a remote server, no downloads or installs are necessary. PDFs are entering the domain of cloud computing!

Today we’ll take an in-detail look at a few of these services – PDFMeNot, Vuzit and SamurajData – simple, extensive and minimalistic.

PDFMeNot

You might know the guys behind PDFMeNot from other successful projects like BugMeNot (access ‘must register to view’ sites) and RetailMeNot (giving you wonderful discounts by providing tons of coupons).

Like said previous projects, PDFMeNot trades in simplicity and great functionality. Don’t expect something fancy, with tons of offers and premium accounts – PDFMeNot does what you want it to do, does it well, and does not bother you with anything else.

PDFMeNot allows you to upload a PDF file from your computer, or to provide a valid web link. After some moments, during which the PDF gets read and processed to a more web-friendly format, you’re able to view your document(s) in-browser.  Since popular documents get cached, you won’t always have to wait out the conversion process.

The web viewer temporarily caches the whole document and provides you with a basic interface. You might not be able to make annotations, or do any kind of markup, but PDFMeNot does a good enough job as a reading tool.

Vuzit

To be honest, Vuzit isn’t really a tool to view PDFs online. However, on the site you’ll be able to find a ‘free test tool’ that does everything we need it to do.

Like PDFMeNot, Vuzit allows you to upload a file from your hardrive, or locate an existing file online. You might want to watch out what you use it for, though, as Vuzit shows a few of the most recent documents on its webpage – explicit and private content are thus not recommended.

The site keeps your document cached for some time, which allows you to give the link to your friends and/or colleagues. Vuzit makes an excellent choice if you want to pass a document along, and not everyone might have the means or the appreciation for PDF files. Furthermore, Vuzit also has a nice little ‘download’ button, for those people who still prefer an offline back-up.

The basic Vuzit interface and functionality highly resembles that of PDFMeNot – it even looks a tad better and comes with search functionality.

SamurajData

If you’re a minimalist, you might prefer SamurajData. This is without any doubt the lightweight PDF reader, with minimum looks and minimum functionality.

Instead of displaying the PDF in your browser, SamurajData converts the document to a series of GIF images. As you might know, these images take up very little memory, but come with a certain loss of quality. As such, your text might well be readable, but you won’t have the most pretty of documents.

SamurajData uses no flash, and instead has a completely HTML-based interface. You can browse the different pictures (read: pages) and optionally rotate them.

In short, if you’re looking for a really lightweight solution to view PDFs online, SamurajData probably is your man. However, if you’ve got a decent internet connection, I highly suggest to you to give one of the former two options a shot.

Another option you might also want to consider is Scribd.

Do you ever use an online PDF solution, or do you prefer to read your documents offline? If you do, what website do you use? Tell us all about it in the comments section below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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A lot of people enjoy other word processors, and I would never claim that Microsoft Word is the best one out there. All you have to do is read articles like Israel’s 6 Less Known Free Word Processors or Aseem’s 6 Free Office Suites That Are NOT Microsoft to recognize that there are some amazing and very useful word processors out there.

However, there are over 500 million Microsoft Word users in the world, and it’s still the most popular word processor out there. Because of that, many people often find themselves sifting through the Internet for tips on some of those not-so-easy tasks within Microsoft word.

Today, I’m going to offer 4 of the most useful Microsoft Word Tips that I’ve learned through the years. These include:

• Placing an image anywhere in a document without ruining text formatting.
• Inserting page numbering into the footer and starting the numbering over in new sections.
• Inserting pop-up comments for highlighted text inside your document.
• Making use of integrated Internet functionality to research selected text within word documents.

I’ve found each one of these techniques to be extremely useful throughout the years, and I’m sure you will too if you haven’t already tried them. For the purpose of this article I’m using MS Word 2003 so that most readers (who likely have later versions) will more likely have all of the features available that are shown in this article.

1. Placing An Image In Your Document Anywhere You Like

For the purpose of demonstration, I’m using the text from my recent article on how to repair a CD with toothpaste, but I’ve removed the images. Many people just insert images into a word document between paragraphs, since this is the easiest and simplest method to embed images in your document. However, if you want to have images appear within your document like on a typical web page, where the text flows smoothly around the image – it’s possible using a simple approach I call, “playing inside the box.”  Let’s say that you have a word document formatted in the standard way, as shown here.

Now, if you try to just do an Insert -> Picture where the blue circle is located, all of the text gets shoved rudely down the page as your inserted image takes over that entire section of the document. Don’t worry – you can teach your image to play nicely with text by forcing it to: Play Inside The Box.

Start off by inserting a text box (Insert -> Text Box) anywhere on the document, and then move it so that it’s located where you want the image.

Now, right click on it and select “Format Text Box“.  Under the “Colors and Lines” tab, make sure “Lines” is set to “No Line.“  Then, under the “Layout” tab, make sure that “Square” is selected. Click OK, and now your document will look like this.

As you can see, the text box is now invisible, and the text wraps cleanly around it. Just click anywhere inside your invisible text box, insert your image (the box will automatically resize to fit the photo) and you now have a cleanly embedded photo within your document. This technique also works to the right side of the text if you wish as well.

2. Page Numbering Magic

Another thing that many people like to do, especially when writing a multi-part manual or long document, is to number multiple sections of a document starting over from 1. Most people know how to insert page numbers into the footer of a document, but re-numbering starting within multiple new sections can get tricky.

The first step is to create the page numbering format that you want.  For this example, I’m inserting a number in the footer that reads “Page x of x”. You do this by going to View -> Header and Footer, switching to footer and centering the text, and then typing in the text “Page“, then click on the “Insert Page Number” button, type “of” and then click on “Insert Number of Pages” button.

This is your standard page numbering setup. But what if you want to start over at Page 1 on the next page, to start a brand new section of your document?  First, you need to define the next page as a new section by going to the page and clicking “Insert -> Break” and choosing the “Next Page” section type.

Now, when you go back into “View -> Header and Footer“, you’ll notice that the footer for Section 2 has the normal continuation of page numbers from the previous section. To change this, when you’re viewing the footer for Section 2 (or the section you want to start over), just click the “Format Page Number” button and change the “Page Numbering” to start at “1″.

Now your page numbers for Section 2 will start at page 1 and continue on until you create another section break and start the numbering all over again.

3. Pop-Up Comments For Editing or Offering Reader Tips

Another really cool feature that I use in a lot of my own documentation are pop-up tips or comments. You can define specific text to pop-up whenever the reader places the mouse cursor over specific text in the document. You can do this by highlighting the text and then selecting Insert -> Comment from the menu.

The manner in which Word has you edit the comment is different depending on your version and what page layout you’re in. After you create the comment, whenever the reader reads your document in normal view, the text you’ve commented only appears highlighted. When they roll the cursor over the text, your comment (or tip) pops-up.

This is an awesome feature for creating a user manual or a how-to document, because you can embed additional information about a term or idea without cluttering the rest of your document with information that not everyone reading it might need or find useful.

4. Researching Selected Text Within Word

The last useful Microsoft Word tip that I’d like to share is one that I use more often when I’m reading someone else’s documents. If you’re reading along, and there’s a particular word or term that looks foreign, or there’s a concept that you’d really like to learn more about – Microsoft Word has an entire research library integrated into it. All you have to do is highlight the text or phrase, right click on it, and select “Look Up…”

You’ll immediately notice an entire menu bar open up on the right side of the screen with all of the research options available to you, including not only the typical dictionary or thesaurus resources, but also research sites like Factiva iWorks, HighBeam Research, Live Search (now Bing) and more.

For each of the research sites like Live Search, the results show up right inside Microsoft Word. If you spot one that may be helpful, you can click the link and go to the site outside of Word. I’ve used this particular feature in Word (particularly the Encyclopedia) many times, and I consider it probably the most helpful embedded tool within Word.

Were any of these tips brand new to you? Or are you an old formatting pro with a few unique tips of your own? Check our more Microsoft Word tips here and share your own tips in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Microsoft Office As An Offline Google Docs Editor with Offisync [Windows] (14)
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Technology has shifted the reading habit of modern people to use soft copies of documents and books. Yet, among the flood of the PDFs and DOCs and RTFs and other electronic document formats, we often see this sentence written on the virtual pages: “Please print this document for your convenience”. That sentence is the polite way of saying that reading electronic documents is still “inconvenient” for most people.

Environment issues aside, the fact is: people still print their electronic documents. And the most convenient reading format for most people is in the form of a book (instead of sheets of easy-to-be-scattered-around paper). So we are going to discuss the free and easy methods of booklet printing your electronic documents, the Mac way.

(Im)positioning the pages

A booklet is a document which is printed in such a way that when you fold the printed pages in the middle and staple them, the pages will be in correct order as a book would be. This means the pages have to be imposed and sorted before printing and four pages are printed on one sheet of paper.

For example, a document with 8 pages would be printed as:

• Pages 8 and 1 in the first sheet of paper on the first side,
• Pages 2 and 7 in the first sheet of paper on the second side,
• Pages 6 and 3 in the second sheet of paper on the first side, and
• Pages 4 and 5 in the second sheet of paper on the second side.

You can do this manually if you wanted to. First, you rearrange the pages, then you set your printing job to print two pages of the document in one sheet of paper. It’s not a big problem with 8-page document. But with 20 or more pages, the task of rearranging would be a frustrating one. Believe me, I’ve tried it with 36-page document. Not to mention that the whole arrangement would be useless if you edited the document.

Three free booklet creators

Luckily, there are several applications to make the booklet printing process easier.

1. The first one is Create Booklet. This is a PDF service which can be accessed from the Print menu. Click the PDF button and choose Create Booklet from menu.

To split document with a large number of pages, you have to choose the range of the pages to print and repeat the process as many as necessary.

The result booklet will be opened with Preview. You have to choose Print one more time to really print the booklet onto paper.

2. The second is an old booklet printing application called CocoaBooklet. This is a stand alone application which hasn’t been updated since 2006 but still working fine under Leopard. At the time of writing, the developer’s site is not online, but the direct link to download the application is still available.

To use this app, you just right-click any PDF file and choose Open with –> Cocoa Booklet. You can also open any PDF file from the application’s Open menu.

It will ask you where you want to save the file. Open the resulting file to print the booklet onto paper.

To split a long book, open the application and go to the Preferences menu. Choose Options, check “Split the document into several booklets” and decide the number of maximum pages for each sub-booklet. The application will automatically split the file into booklets with the set number of pages. No re-print process necessary like Create Booklet.

3. The last booklet printing tool is BookletCreator, a free online service for creating booklets from PDF. Since this one is online, this service could be utilized by all users under all operating system. You just upload the PDF document, decide how many pages you want per booklet and the size of paper, then click CreateBooklet.

Do you have other alternative of free booklet creator? Share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Well not anymore, thanks to Offisync which allows you to use, update and synchronize your Google Docs onto Microsoft Office – as well as offering the ability to search on Google from the Office interface and insert images into your Office documents from Google Images.

This is one of those services that will prove to be insanely useful if you are in the habit of switching between them both all the time.   For it to work though, you need :

• Either Office 2003 or Office 2007
• Windows XP / Vista or Windows 7.
• Microsoft’s .net framework version 3.5, which will automatically be installed on your computer if you don’t already have it.
• A Google account to be able to use Docs (that one is a bit obvious!)

You first have to install a small toolbar which sits in your Office documents.   It looks like this :

To open a document from Google Docs, just press the small yellow folder icon on the far left and a box will appear asking you to enter your Google account name and password.   I was initially a bit concerned about entering my Google account password so I emailed OffiSync and asked them if they store the account details on their servers.   Their answer is an emphatic no.

User Names and Passwords are stored in the Windows Credentials Manager (CredMan) service on your computer. OffiSync does not store any credentials on our servers or on the Google servers.

That reassured me somewhat so I proceeded with entering my password.   When your details have been accepted, your list of Google Docs files will come up (I don’t normally use Google Docs so I created a test document for this article).

Just double-click on the Google Docs file that you want to work on in Microsoft Office and it will immediately open in Word.  If you have lots of documents and you can’t find the one you want, just click the black binoculars in the Offisync toolbar and you can filter out the file you want by entering keywords.

Now this is the file that I created with a simple short sentence.   All you basically need to do now is just work on your document and periodically save the changes using the Offisync toolbar.

Say, I want to add “Now I’m updating it” to the document -

When you’re finished with the document and you want to synchronize your changes with the copy in your Google Docs account — all you need to do is click the black disk icon on your Offisync toolbar and you will see this -

After a few seconds, that box will disappear and the updated version of the document will now be in your Google Docs account. Let’s check on that.

Yup, there it is!

There are other features to Offisync too. Basically the app gives you all the power of Google Docs but inside Microsoft Office instead.   Offisync allows you to do the following :

• Add or remove collaborators to the online Google document



• Email the online Google document to someone



• Paste the link to the Google Docs copy of the file in your Word copy.

But the best part of Offisync (in my opinion) is the ability to insert images from Google Images into your Word document.   Everything opens in Offisync’s custom-made mini browser.

Since I’ve just been to see Transformers 2 at the cinema, let’s see what pictures there are of Optimus Prime on Google Images.

As you can see, you can filter the images down to size, type and also by creative commons.  When you have found one you want to use, click “Insert” and you will receive a box notifying you where it has come from :

If you accept it, click “Accept” and the image will then be embedded into the Word document.

Offisync doesn’t only support Word though.   You can also use the feature in Microsoft’s Excel and Powerpoint to keep those documents synchronized as well.

And that’s it!   This one is going into my “keeper” pile of software apps as it has already motivated me to use Google Docs more and so far I haven’t found any bugs or really irritating features.  I really hope Offisync continues to be developed and I can’t wait to see what other features they come up with next.

Let us know what you think.   Is this something you would use?  What features do you like the best and what new features would you like Offisync to introduce?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Great Alternatives To Google Docs You Should Consider (28)
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• How to Freeze a Part of a Word Document for Easy Reference (13)

So, you can use all the help you can get. I am going to show you a few sites where you can grab free downloadable resume templates. Some of the templates are in PDF format and some of them are in Word format.

The first thing you should do is grab an old copy of your resumé or a list of your past jobs and accomplishments.

That will help you immensely when you need to replace the generic information with your own.

The first site I found has very generic templates that will allow you to totally customize the resumé. This is just for the formatting, there is little to no content that you will be able to use.

These are called Blank Resumé Templates and can be found here: http://www.professional-resume-example.com/free-blank-resume-template.html

They offer three types of resumé templates and they are Chronological format, Functional Format and Combination. We will show you each of them here with a link to their respective PDFs

This is the plain Jane old school format. Still expected by older companies and should not exceed one page. The next up is a variation on the classic resumé and called the Functional resumé seen below:

And then there is the combination of the both of them:

And next up, we have http://www.collegegrad.com/ with their resumé section located at http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/quickstart. The difference between these two sites is that Collegegrad breaks up their resumés by major. So, you can find a more specific resumé geared towards you to customize. I choose computer science and got this: http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/quickstart/compsci.doc

And last but not least, http://www.easyjob.net has free downloadable resumé templates broken down in 3 categories:

And best of all – all this information is FREE! Between this site and browsing other people’s resumés on Monster.com, Hotjobs.com or any of the other popular job seeking sites you can customize your resumé and make it pop! Remember a direct cover letter is just as important as a great resume!

Do you have a favorite free resume template website? Maybe you have some other job seeking tips? Well, if you do, leave them in the comments!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Your automated backups can go to multiple destinations, including other computers you use, or even friends’ computers. Backing up to locations other than CrashPlan’s servers is free, and you can be notified of completed backups by either email or Twitter.

In order to have a friend backup to your PC, you must give that friend a short authorization code. You can do this with multiple friends, as you’re only limited by your available disk space. Your backups are stored securely and must be unlocked with your CrashPlan password (you may also use a different password for added security).

By default, your My Documents folder is selected for the backup. You may wish to add or remove folders from the backup if you have a size concern. I like how there is an option to show hidden files which may otherwise get left out of the backup.

This program is fast. On a high-speed connection, it only took an hour to backup 23GB. Keep in mind that this is between two PCs on the same home network, but moving that much data in such a short time is still impressive.

Restoring files from a backup to any computer is as simple as backing them up in the first place. Restored files and folders will be moved to the appropriate place on the file system you’re currently using.

I found CrashPlan simple, quick, and easy to use, and highly recommend it to anyone needing a backup solution. For extra features or business use, a paid upgrade is available, although the free solution will work just fine for most. I intend on convincing my brother to trade disk space with me for a backup arrangement. How will you use CrashPlan, or can you share any alternative solution on how to backup computer files? Let’s see ‘em in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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You bet that anyone working on a large Microsoft Word document finds that irksome; especially when one needs to refer to a specific part of a document several times. So what do you do in this case? Open two instances of the same document?

MS Excel makes it easy with its longstanding feature to freeze rows and columns.

Could a similar idea be ‘imported’ into Word? I found the solution in Microsoft Word’s own team blog. And it was surprisingly… quite easy.

The requirement…

Let’s say there is a figure, a graph, a chart or just some text that needs to be referred to while plotting the remaining document. Instead of scrolling to and fro, we want to freeze that part while working on the remaining document.

The method…

1. Click on the View tab on MS Word 2007 ribbon menu.
2. Click on the Split Window icon and position the split bar where just below the part you want to keep static. The Split window feature allows you to view different sections of the same window at the same time.

   

3. With the document split into two panes, you can work on one pane while keeping the other pane static for reference. For instance, in the figure the top pane with the chart is kept static while the bottom pane becomes the work area.

   

4. Click on each pane and use the View commands to change the view or the layout. For instance, you can keep the top pane in the Print layout, while working on the Web layout in the bottom pane. We can pretty much treat the two panes as two separate windows.
5. The widow split can be changed back by clicking on the Remove Split icon or by double clicking on the split bar.

Simple needs sometimes beget simple solutions. It is the job of the View tab to make the job of screening a document easier. A feature used in the right place adds ‘very’ to the ‘easy’.

Did this tip help to solve a tiny little problem? If it did help to enhance your productivity, drop us a comment.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Microsoft Office As An Offline Google Docs Editor with Offisync [Windows] (14)
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There is. Well, sort of. There’s going to be. It’s called Presentations, and is the latest offering from the folks at Adobe’s Acrobat.com, the makers of (among other things) Buzzword, a fantastic online word processor.

To get to Presentations, go to the Acrobat.com site, and look at the bottom. There’s a link for Presentations near the bottom – this is Adobe’s way of making sure you know it’s not a full-featured release yet. But it’s still darn good.

I was able to have a brief discussion with the folks at Acrobat.com before Presentations was launched, and they mentioned something that’s critical to Web-based apps being successful. There are three basic principles and points on which Presentations was founded: ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience. In all three realms, Presentations scores high.

The basic product is the same as any other presentation software – it lets you create slides, and then show them to other people. Adobe’s offering, though, offers a bunch of stuff that’s different and better. The best thing, in my opinion, is how much better the collaboration features are – better than PowerPoint, and better than any other online presentations tool.

A huge number of people can be working on the same presentation, or the same slide, or even the same word or image. You’ll see avatars for each person working on the presentation, listed next to the slide they’re currently editing. Conflicting changes are presented to the users, just in case your work overlaps with another collaborator.

There are a bunch of other great features to Presentations – the little things are what really shine. There are a number of themes available, which are easily customized to your liking (great for corporate use, where they tend to mandate a template). Diagrams can be created separately, and then moved around and edited together.

The navigation system is also a major upgrade from other applications. Even when you’re in presentation mode, you can bring up a small dock-like list of all your slides, letting you easily choose the one you want – avoiding that terrible “scrolling-through-everything-to-find-the-right-slide” moment. You drag the window to change the view of the slides, depending on how you want to edit them.

But it’s not all candy and rainbows, unfortunately. Acrobat.com notes frequently that Presentations is very much an early, unstable release, and it has some major notable features missing. There’s no spell-check, no support for importing movies other than .FLV files, and no import and export with PowerPoint – you can only save a Presentation to PDF.

There’s also no sharing of themes, no way to invite someone to view the presentation as anything other than a co-editor, and no way to make comments or notes on slides and presentations.

For now, Presentations is a slick, usable application. But as bugs get fixed and features get quickly rolled out, Presentations is going to bring ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience to a new level within the world of presentations. They’re easier to create, easier to navigate, and Presentations is a gorgeous app.

Worried about your next presentation? Tina shows you have to blow your audiences minds away with 10 Powerpoint tips.

What tool do you use for giving presentations? Present them to us in the comments.

Photo: garethjmsaunders

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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If you choose not to, you risk exposing some intimate aspects to a malicious person, sniffing the internet traffic at a local hub or router. The same thing happens if you use a weak password or security question for your email account.

If that information was encrypted to start with, the sniffer would receive a bunch of seemingly random bits – and even if the person knew that it was encrypted, he still wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. And the guy who guessed your password still won’t have the private/public key combination to decrypt the actual message. Personally, I would sleep better at night knowing that I took this precautions for my own safety.

Now that we did some explaining for writing the article, lets delve into the world of encryption. Using the steps below, you will be able to encrypt any text message, including plain text email. Unfortunately, this tutorial will only cover the steps necessary for a Windows system using GnuPG. So, I invite my colleagues to teach you about encryption for Mac and Linux.

Instead of covering different plugins that interface GnuPG to clients like Thunderbird, I’ll show you how to do it the old fashion way which doesn’t require installing anything else than GnuPG, and is universally compatible.

• Download GnuPG for Windows from this page. Choose the current stable version of the program. The beta runtime is significantly larger, requires a restart, and it may contain bugs.
• From the start menu, choose to open WinPT. WinPT is a program that manages all the encryption/decryption keys you use.

• Generate your private key/public key set by clicking on ‘Generate a GnuPG key pair’. Learn about how this encryption scheme works by reading this article in Wikipedia.
• Select a name for your key pair and an email address that the key pair will be associated to. You will then have to enter a password that will unlock this very long encryption key pair. Remember that the encryption is as strong as the password you choose right now. Entering ‘123456’ is a very very bad idea if you really want to protect data.

• Success! Your initial key will be shown in the WinPT window.



• Open Wordpad.
• Send the receiving party your PGP public key by right-clicking on the key icon in the taskbar and selecting Current Window>Sign.
• Send the text that appears to the person which you wish to communicate with. They will need to send you their public key if they want to reply in encrypted format.
• Save the received PGP key as a .txt document and import it in WinPT by clicking Key>Import.
• Encrypt the message by either copying the text to the clipboard or by selecting Current Window>Encrypt in the taskbar. Paste the encrypted text to a new email and click send.

You can even encrypt files via File Manager>File>Encrypt into ZIP. In the window that appears, select the receiver’s public key. To decrypt, the receiver simply has to drag and drop the file into the File Manager.

And to answer proactively to a question I see coming – yes, I think it is possible that all our current encryption techniques can be broken by an organization such as the NRO or NSA. Come to think about it, during our history as humans, we invented a lot of encryption methods that turned out to be flawed, one of the most notorious being the Enigma machine.

You should also check out how to encrypt Gmail messages with FirePG written by Jorge Sierra and and this how-to on Truecrypt by Mark O’Neil.

What’s your take on encryption? Do you use it? Do you think you’ll ever need it? Have you say in the comments.

Image Credits: Flickr – Ngoc Ha

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Every now and then you would get a file that is not supported on your computer, there are couple of ways to tackle such a situation:

If you want to view and print the contents

If all you want to do is view the file and dont want to make any changes then look into TextMaker Viewer.

A 4MB download that allows you to view and print documents in a variety of different formats. Once you have it installed you can view almost all of the common document formats irrespective of the fact whether you have the requisite software installed or not.

TextMaker viewer allows you to open, view and print docx, sxw, dotx, rtf, doc, dot Microsoft Word templates, pwd, tmd, htm/html, odt and txt files.

On the other hand if most of your chores are related to Office 2007 file formats (i.e. docx) and if you have still not made the jump to Office 2007 you can use these Microsoft downloads to get those files working on Microsoft Office 2003, XP etc.

If you want to edit the contents

If you would like to work upon a file that is not supported by the software you have installed, you have to go for file conversion and hope that everything turns out the way you wanted.

If you are going for conversion there are some pretty handy online resources that you should keep in mind. Cometdocs and Convertfiles are excellent for such purposes. You can mostly convert all the common document file formats using these two sites.

Zamzar is another very popular site for similar purposes. Besides documents it also does video, audio and text to speech, so you might want to check it out for your other conversion needs as well.

Online resources generally have a file size limit and you might have to wait in some cases, if you are looking for a solution that is “closer” to home you might want to check out the “Save As” feature of your software. Generally there are plenty of formats available that you can choose from so that your recepient is able to use your file. OpenOffice as an example is able to read doc, docx, pdf besides the native formats, so if you happen to be using OpenOffice you can always open a file and save it in the desired format.

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Tag clouds are much easier to grasp than simple lists, as words can be weighted with the help of font size and color.

We see tag clouds on lots of sites these days. Almost in all cases the purpose of the tag cloud is to give user an easier way to browse the site and at the same time see popular content.

Here are some of my favorite ways tag clouds are used on the web.

1. Discover New Music

The Music Artist Cloud is an artist recommendation engine. Try to “Get Artist Cloud” for a band you like and receive a cloud of similar musicians you might enjoy. I love many of the suggested bands and there are yet a few to be explored.

The site also fetches music videos from YouTube which you can watch while noting down discoveries.

2. Extract Information from Twitter

Using Tweet Cloud you can create a tag cloud based on a keyword or Twitter ID. This tag cloud shows you the major words found in the most recent tweets and their occurrence frequency in relation to each other. The cloud rotates in 3D and you can click words to explore them further.

3. Create Fancy Word Art

Wordle was built for no other purpose than to play with it and create pretty word clouds. You provide the text and can tweak fonts, layouts and color schemes. Results can be printed, downloaded and saved to the Wordle gallery. Below are some recent examples.

4. Improve Google Search

Search Cloudlet is a Firefox extension. The next time you search Google, Yahoo or Twitter after installing this tool you will find a tag cloud on top of the search results. This tag cloud derived from search results and shows you all the keywords relevant to your search results.

Users can easily narrow/filter search by clicking keywords on the cloud and adding them to the query. This is a must-have addon for everyone who frequently searches on Google, Yahoo or Twitter.

Where and how Search Cloudlet appears can be optimized within the extension’s option.

5. Analyze Your Texts

Are there words that you use far too often?

Using a tool like TagCrowd you can create a tag cloud from any text and analyze whether or not your use of words is balanced. You can enter a webpage URL, upload a text document or paste a piece of text and finally finetune the options. When done preparing click Visualize! and wait for the result.

Below is an excerpt from Obama’s inauguration speech.

Where do you find tag clouds helpful?

Image credits: modish

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My Documents is the common folder which by default stores all our personal data i.e. our document files, music, movies, downloads and photos. Within it has the My Music, My Videos and a My Pictures folder to stash a particular file type. So it pays to deal with it like an important filing cabinet and not as a junk drawer.

Over time this folder becomes the ‘Big Daddy’ of all folders. Our personal data storehouse thus needs to be handled well and safeguarded from a digital disaster. It can be done by simply moving it to a safer backup location. In this article we are going to show you how to move the My Documents to a different drive.

There are two serious reasons to do this with immediate effect.

1. Imagine that all your precious documents, photos and sundry other files are organized beautifully in this folder on the system partition (commonly the C Drive). Imagine a system crash. Imagine the loss of never able to recover that data. And now imagine a simple step which could have saved the day.
2. The usual good word is to partition your hard disk into multiples with a minimum size kept for the system drive. With time My Documents will fatten up as more data is stashed away in it. Moving the folder to a different drive saves space and more importantly safeguards it.

How To Move My Documents Folder in Windows XP

1. Right click on the My Documents icon on the desktop.



2. Click on Move and choose your chosen location for the folder. Move it to a different partition. For instance, I have it on my D Drive.



3. Click Apply and then Ok. A prompt will ask whether you want to move all of the current documents to the new location or not. Choose Yes. All your documents are switched to the new location and it’s all like before except now they are safer from a system crash.



4. These are the elementary steps which will save you a ton of bother at a future date.

How To Move My Documents Folder in Vista

There is a slight change in Vista as the My Documents has given way to a Documents folder. The default location for this folder is C:\Users\[username]\Documents where [username] is your Windows Vista username and C Drive is the default installation drive. Vista creates Documents folder for each User profile on the computer and stores it in the appropriate profile folder. The process to change the location is relatively same,

1. Click on the Start button.
2. Right-click on Document. For multiple users click your account name in the right-hand menu. Select Properties.



3. In the Properties dialog select the Location tab.



4. Next, click on Move. In the Destination dialog select the new location for your Documents folder. Click on Select Folder to return to the Properties dialog. The new location appears in the text box.



5. Click on Ok. Vista prompts you to confirm again and with a Yes click your task is done as the documents get shifted over to the new location.

The brief tutorial might be simplicity itself and experienced users might even scoff at it. But I have seen many neglect this fundamental step of data backup. And isn’t it true that the small things we take for granted are sometimes taken away from us. With few uncomplicated steps, at least it won’t be the documents in our My Documents folder.

Have there been times when you have found movinf My Document folder to a different drive a lifesaver? Or have overlooked it to your loss?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Available as a Firefox addon and thus available for Windows, Linux and Mac Outwit is a web collection engine that lets you search for documents, images and other kinds of information online and displays the results in a very Windows Explorer like interface.

Head over to the Outwit webpage and install the Firefox addon. There are separate addons for Outwit Hub, Outwit Docs and Images. You can then access the Outwit interface via the toolbar button or the tools menu.

Consider Outwit Docs for example. Once you open it up its pretty intuitive, type what you want to search in the search box and you will see results from Internet and your local files. You can check/uncheck the type of files you want to search for. Found the file you were looking for? Great, just right click and choose to open it up or save it or whatever you would want to do with it.

You can have multiple searches going on simultaneously (reminiscent of something like Limewire) and the results would continue to increase when more such files are discovered that meet your search criteria.

Then there is a basket (strangely called the “catch”) which is like a temporary holding place for the documents (your catch) that you find interesting and would like to download later in bulk.

So much for documents, there is a lot more you can do. Outwit Images that lets you search for images in a similar fashion. Even more powerful tool however is the Outwit Hub. Where as Outwit docs and Outwit images search for documents and images respectively, Outwit Hub can be used to search for a variety of information types.

Outwit Hub is used for information extraction from webpages. Fire it up and then enter the search query or URL of a webpage. Outwit Hub will then show you different kinds of data that can be extracted from the webpage. Click on the view type on the left hand side pane and you can view the page, all the images on the page, links, email addresses, text, rss feeds found and so on. Then there are the data extraction tools which allow you to extract data from tables, lists and other data structures on the webpage.

These tools have a great potential if you are looking for data or documents of any kind. Granted, you can always copy and paste and search for them on Google but you can do so much more with tools like these. A lot more flexibility, more control and ease of use. You can for example extract the data from a table and export it as excel spreadsheet or as SQL statements in just a few clicks from within Outwit Hub.

Do you know of any such tools or extensions you use for similar purposes? Mention them in comments, we would love to hear and check them out!

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In these kinds of situations, sending a fax for free as quickly as possible would certainly be useful. In this article, we’re taking a look at 4 websites that let you send fax online and come with a free or trial version.

1. faxZERO

The first one on our list is faxZERO. faxZERO allows you to send two free faxes a day, to the United States or Canada, as long as they don’t contain more than three pages each. Plus there is an ad on the cover page. Out of all the services we tested, faxZERO is the easiest to use and the only one that didn’t require creating an account.

faxZERO also has a premium service that charges 1.99$ for each fax and limits the number of pages per fax at fifteen. If you need to send more than two faxes a day and you don’t want to pay for the premium service, you could consider deleting your browser cache and cookies and using another IP address, either through the TOR network, proxies or simply by resetting your router.

2. Qipit

Qipit is a more comprehensive service when compared to faxZERO. Instead of being just an online faxing service, Qipit helps you upload photos of documents, business cards or receipts from a mobile phone or digital camera, and improves the image quality through a patented technology called Realeyes3D. Next images can be emailed or faxed.

The images you upload are stored online on Qipit’s servers and are also accessible online via the website.

You can upload photos via MMS, email or directly from your computer using the web interface.

Once your document is on Qipit, you can choose to either view a PDF version of it, email the document or fax it. Qipit’s image optimization technology proved to be quite powerful. I never expected that a photo taken with a mobile phone camera could actually be put to use.

The great thing about Qipit is that it’s free:

Qipit is a free service; this includes sending domestic and international faxes. The costs that you have to bare are related to what your wireless carrier charges you if you are using Qipit with your mobile device. –Qipit FAQ.

3. ScanR

ScanR, a service similar to Qipit. The trial subscription gives you only one upload and fax, but the premium account is only 4,99$/month or 29,99$/year. ScanR features OCR (optical character recognition), a slightly better designed interface and sharing capability.

An interesting quote from their help pages suggest that some fax numbers are restricted:

scanR currently sends fax to most phone numbers in East Asia, North America and Western Europe. scanR may block certain premium phone numbers and countries[…] –ScanR Help

You get the same uploading capabilities, via email, MMS or web interface.

Another cool feature of Scanr is that you can use is to convert document pictures that were obtained using you cell phone camera to a properly formatted document. Very useful for things like page captures from library books and lecture notes.

eFax

Another faxing service is eFax. With eFax, you can also receive faxes, but unfortunately it requires you sign up for a 30 day trial using a credit card.

Know about other free tool to send fax online? Let us know in the comments.

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That’s where doPDF shifts into place. This free PDF converter not only rescues you from having a hole drilled into your pocket where loose change starts to seep out but it also saves you a whole lot of productivity time as well.

Here’s How to Get Started

doPDF is extremely simple to use so if you don’t have a lot of patience with 3^rd party applications fear no more because you’ll have a smooth time with this software.

First you need to download this app. Once you’ve installed the application just open up a document in Microsoft Word, NotePad, WordPad or pretty much any other text editing software. I’m going to use Microsoft Word for the sake of this tutorial.

Next you have to go to File-> Print-> doPDF.

Now you just have to click OK and a small window will pop-up asking you where you’d like to save your new PDF document, once you’ve chosen your preferred location then click OK once again.

And you’re finished, it’s as easy as that! With these few steps you’ve just created a high quality PDF document.

Before the conversion:

After the conversion:

Conclusion:

The entire process from begining to end shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. It is possible that as doPDF converts a document the file can suffer from minor unusually formatted images or texts, however for the most part doPDF is pretty accurate.

At the moment there’s no option to print web pages (for example: news articles or pages off a forum) that automatically divide into separate pages, thus you’ll most likely end up with lines that divide the article or page throughout your PDF document, if you decide to print directly from the web.

Another quick issue I discovered was the size of the file doPDF creates. The size of the document can be a bit large and sometimes daunting depending on how many images a page may contain, though if you can manage to use WinZip or a free similar app to ZIP the file up, it shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Please feel free to MakeUseOf the comment box below and leave us your thoughts.  What similar apps do you use?

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For a while now, my solution has been Google Docs. It’s a great service, and one that has served me well over the months and years I’ve been using it. Google Docs, though, is not without its issues and downsides, some of which have left me in constant search for the best and brightest of the online document managing application.

Well, I haven’t found it yet, but I’ve found five pretty great alternatives to Google Docs that you might want to check out. All of these, and Google Docs, offer the same basic editing features; instead of rehashing them over and over, I’ll point out the one or few great features that put the application on this list.

Buzzword

My current online editor of choice, Buzzword, is Adobe’s offering in the online word-processing department. It’s attractive, flash-based, and incredibly simple to use. In addition to all the standard features, Buzzword offers a few key uses for users of all levels. Buzzword lets you share documents with people, giving individuals varying levels of access, from comments to editing to just reading the document.

Also useful is the Version History tracker, which tracks your changes and lets you revert to an earlier version of the document in only one click.

Buzzword is the prettiest of the bunch, and while it’s not terribly feature-rich when it comes to document editing, its collaboration and tracking tools more than make up for it.

Zoho

The number of applications Zoho offers, from an email service to a personal wiki and a “centralized public repository” (whatever that is) is ridiculous. I’ve become a big Zoho fan recently, and it has a huge number of useful tools at your disposal.

The writer itself is excellent, with a ton of editing options organized in a way that looks much like Office 2007’s Ribbon interface. Almost anything you can do in Word can be done in Zoho, from adding a header and footer to directly posting a document to your blog.

Zoho is the most feature-complete of the Web-based applications, including Google Docs, and is incredibly easy to use. Zoho doesn’t get nearly the press Google Docs does, but I can’t see a reason not to switch to Zoho.

Etherpad

If collaboration is what you’re into, give Etherpad a good look. There’s no need to sign up for Etherpad – just click “Start New Pad” and get going. Then, either share a link to the pad or send invitations to your contacts by email.

As users come in, you can edit the text on the pad in real-time, and changes automatically appear. You can chat in the sidebar, highlight which user made a given change, and save revisions in order to revert if a mistake is made.

Etherpad is perfect for coding and programming, but is also great for writing and editing documents. There aren’t as many features to Etherpad, and all your editing is in plain text, but it’s so collaborative and useful that it deserves a mention anyway.

Peepel

Peepel is basically a whole suite of desktop applications, stored within your browser. You can run multiple Peepel windows in the same browser window, letting you manage more pieces of your workflow all at once.

Peepel offers services like the WebWriter word processor, WebSheet for spreadsheets, a contact manager, great file-sharing and collaboration tools, and the Workspace Manager that lets you save your layout and return to it later.

Peepel isn’t the flashiest of the applications, but I love the ability to run more than one document or application in the same window.

OpenGoo

OpenGoo is similar in appearance to both Google Docs and the Zoho suite, with a well-integrated interface available to you. You can access calendars, tasks, documents, sticky notes, email, contacts, and time-tracking tools all from within the OpenGoo interface.

For document editing, OpenGoo is much like Google Docs. You can create documents or slideshows, and the interface is much like Google’s. You can edit documents, and then tag them or add them to folders for easier organization.

One thing I liked was that a new document is opened in the same window, with the document browser in the sidebar, whereas Google Docs always opens a new window.

If all you want is documents, there’s not a lot unique about OpenGoo; if you’re looking for a more complete interface and application, it’s a great choice.

What do you use for document editing, either online or off? Which one of the above mentioned online office apps in your opinon is the best alternative to Google Docs?

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I’m not convinced it exists (if it does, let me know and I’ll be your best friend), but A.nnotate is a service that gets as close as anything I’ve found on the Web.

A.nnotate lets you annotate and upload documents of almost any kind – PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, RTF, and HTML are all supported. It works totally within your web browser (currently Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari), and is an easy and useful solution.

Documents can be uploaded via a web page, or sent as an email attachment by cc’ing a given a.nnotate address (useful for telling your colleagues about it).

Once it’s online, there are a number of features at your disposal. You can highlight text, write notes, tag a given document, or comment on it. Notes can be anything – you can connect them with text, or an image, or even just a blank space of the screen.

When you upload a document, you can share it with anyone you choose; you can always, of course, keep it private and deal with it yourself. When you share it, you can email a link asking for comments, and a conversation can take place right with the document.

In addition, there are a number of other privacy-based features. You can make a note private, or only accessible to the owner of the document. Visibility of all parts of the document and its edits are able to be shown or hidden as you want.

All the edits and notes are time-stamped, and totally searchable. You can also search through the notes and documents, and get a timeline of all the changes made on a given document.

If you’re the owner of the document, A.nnotate offers several different ways to track edits – you can see whenever a document is edited, or whenever a particular person edits the document.

Your documents are stored on the A.nnotate servers, and there are a number of ways to categorize them. You can organize them by folder or sub-folder, view them in a number of different ways using thumbnails and folders, and search easily through all your documents. You can also, if you so desire, share whole folders with specific people instead of just individual documents.

A.nnotate offers both a free version and a paid version of their software. The free version comes with the ability to upload 30 pages per month, and also has limitations for how many people can access and edit a given document. That’s a fairly small number, but is enough for using in a pinch (which is all I use it for anyway).

If you’re business-minded, there are also options for education and standalone servers, allowing you to host the documents yourself. A.nnotate is definitely geared toward the business crowd, and privacy and security is one of their chief concerns.

If you’re in need of a way to collaborate on everything from books to web pages, A.nnotate is a simple, secure and attractive way to do just that.

What do you use for collaborating with others online?

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So what do you do when you want to fill out forms online or edit a PDF? Need to mark up a PDF? Well you can’t do that with the free version of Acrobat Reader. So we have to find another solution!

Nifty website pdfVue does exactly what we need it to do. As long as we aren’t working on top secret documents (or even tax forms for that matter) we should have no problem in uploading our documents to PDFVue’s server and then manipulate them using their online Adobe Acrobat Pro-esque editor.

Let’s see what PDFVue has to offer and how we can Make Use Of It. (Pun intended – suck it up!)

It looks like they want you to click on the folder icon on the top left under the PDFVue logo. This will let you browse to your PDF file on your local machine. I chose a invoice I had in PDF format and uploaded it. It was under 100KB and took about 45 seconds to upload to their server.

When it was complete I had my full invoice in a web editor. I was able to mark it up, draw funny shapes and even stick sticky notes over crucial data so I wouldn’t get sued!

The tab at the upper right hand side of the screen that says Forms will give you the ability to edit forms and save the finished product. Using this feature, you can add text boxes and all sorts of corporate goodies.

Now I definitely won’t say this is a Acrobat Pro replacement for me but it will get the job done in a pinch. Of course if you are editing confidential information I would not go uploading it anywhere.  Pester the hell out of your boss until you get the tools you need to do your job!

There are also collaboration tools and some other nifty features discussed in the getting started guide available here.

If you have a Mac, Jackson has covered FormulatePro and in our directory, we have also looked at PDF Escape.

Do you use any of these or a similar tool to edit PDF’s? If you do let us know about your favorite – in the comments!

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Google Docs, in addition to being a stellar way to write, store and manage your documents and slideshows, is also a fantastically useful way to collect survey data. Basically, you send out a form, people fill it in, and Google reports the documents back to you in an incredibly simple and easy-to-understand fashion.

To get started, sign in at Google Docs. If you have a Gmail account, you have a Google Docs account. If you don’t, come out from that rock you live under, boot up the computer, and get yourself a Gmail account. Once you’re logged in, click “New,” and then “Form.”

Give your form a title and an explanation. The explanation field is perfect for explaining what the survey is, or or what people need to know in order to take it properly. Then you start asking questions.

Type the first question into the “Question title” field. Then select whether you want the question to be “text” and have a written response, “paragraph text” which allows for long-form responses, ” multiple choice, scaled (1-10, for example) or a checklist of options.

Fill in all the available answers, choose whether or not to make it a required question (i.e. do they have to answer this one before sending in the survey?), and click “done.”

To get a new question, click the “Add Question” button at the top left of the page. I found it easier though to just duplicate the question by clicking on the two boxes on the right side of the question field, and then change the answers with the formatting already set for me. To each his own, though.

Once you’ve finished creating your form, it’s time to get responses. You can email the form to people, which allows them to fill it out and submit it right from their email – this is probably the way to start. You can also, however, embed the form on a website, and let people fill it in that way; this is better if you’re trying to get mass responses, instead of from a select few people.

When you’re emailing the form, Google Docs hooks up to your Gmail contacts, making the process of sending your form a whole lot faster.

Once people start filling out your form, you can see the responses you get. You can view the summary (with graphs charting who chose or wrote what), or as a spreadsheet to view the individual responses. Particularly for surveys or polls, the summary response is great – especially since you can always click “see complete responses” and have them available to you immediately.

You can edit your form as often as you want, send it to as many recipients as you want, and use the tracking ability for all its worth. Google Docs makes getting information a whole lot more efficient, and a whole lot simpler for both sides of the equation.

Next time you want to ask a question, poll a group, or figure out who’s coming to the party, give Google Docs a shot. It’s okay, you don’t have to thank me.

How do you get information from people?

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What Evernote actually does is offer you essentially a blank slate of information capture and management tools, that allows you to use their product for a huge number of interesting and different things.

Some people use it as their GTD system, some as a way of storing business cards, and any number of things you could think of.

Me? I’ve found seven great ways that Evernote can help my life, and make it simpler and more efficient. Here they are, in no particular order:

Bookmark Manager

One of the best features about Evernote is the Web clipper. Using the desktop version, or a Firefox extension, you can add selections of pages, or even entire Web pages, into Evernote with only a couple of clicks. This, for all intents and purposes, has completely replaced my need for a bookmarking service. Any page I want just gets clipped into my Evernote inbox, and then I can deal with it there.

Evernote actually has most of the features of a good bookmarking service: you can tag bookmarks, search them, and even send them to someone else. Also, you can edit the text of them, so your bookmark contains only the bit you want, along with the URL. Simple, easy, and one less application for me to install.

File Backup

This is the only use of Evernote that differs whether or not you pay for an Evernote Premium Account ($5/month or $40/year, and well worth it). If you’re using the free version, you can use Evernote as a place to store all your pictures, audio, and PDFs. In itself, that’s pretty great, and a nice way to back things up (especially if you’re a fan of backing up your Word Documents to the universally-recognized PDFs, which I am). If you upgrade to Premium, you’ll be able to sync literally any kind of file you can think of (up to 25MB per file, so no movies) to all your computers and desktops.

This is yet another application – online backup – that Evernote does really well. All your files are in sync at all times, and can be accessed from anywhere. Make a change to a file in Evernote, and the changes are automatically saved in the Evernote note. You can email files, view or edit them from anywhere, and always be sure that your precious files are safe.

Photo Library

This is one of the things Evernote did from the beginning that sold me. You can take a picture (cell phone, camera, whatever), and send or upload it to Evernote. Evernote then does a bunch of cool things with your photos: it displays them in an attractive and easy-to-see way, and even recognizes text in your images through its high-powered recognition technology. You can organize and tag your pictures, share them with friends, and have them accessible from anywhere.

This is perfect for family outings and office parties, when everyone wants a copy of that great picture you took. Just add it into Evernote, share the note with everyone, and let them go nuts!

Student Organizer

As a student myself, Evernote’s usefulness exploded when I figured out how to use it for my school work. Now, all my notes and handouts go into Evernote, where I can organize them, tag them, edit them, and view them any time I want. Now, wherever I am, I can be reading or studying my notes, or getting ahead on class reading.

Also, if I need a great quote or need to remember a name of some Aztec ruler, I can search easily through my notes to find exactly what I’m looking for, instead of flipping through a massive pile of papers to try and get what I’m looking for. I can even take pictures of whiteboards or drawings, and Evernote makes them searchable for me.

“Mind Like Water”

Evernote’s most basic use is this one: easily and quickly getting everything out of your head. Evernote has versions for the Web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and even a portable version to go on a thumb drive. You can add voice notes, image notes, or text notes through any of these clients, and organize them as you wish. It’s about as ubiquitous as a capture tool can be, and makes getting things out of your head a lot easier.

If you want to, Evernote can become a full-blown productivity system (a quick Google search will give you ways other people do it). Personally, I use it in conjunction with Remember the Milk, and it’s a great way to get everything in my head out of it, and into my trusted productivity system.

Shopping Helper

Do you buy things? Evernote can help. Next time you’re out, and see something you want, snap a picture of it. Or, when you run out of orange juice, either add it to your Evernote grocery list, or take a picture. You’ll have a constantly-updated, easy to access list of things you want and need.

Evernote is perfect for keeping Birthday and Christmas lists, ideas for things to get, price lists, grocery lists, and any manner of other things. When you’re out, all you need is Evernote, and you’ll never forget anything you need. Ever.

Paperless Life

I’ve recently started taking pictures or scanning all of my receipts. It’s a great way to keep track of where my money goes. I’m also starting to put magazine clippings into Evernote, as well as personal notes, bills, and the like. They all become searchable and organized, and are much more useful in Evernote than just sitting around in piles in my room. My life is becoming increasingly paperless, and all the stuff I accumulate is increasingly easy to manage, thanks to Evernote.

How do you use Evernote? Share it with us!

Photo Credit: MattGrommes

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The PDF format has become the popular standard for sharing documents, so the ability to convert anything that you’re working on into PDF format would allow you to share data much more easily.  The best tool that I’ve found to convert anything to pdf is the free PDF converter called PDF995.

PDF995 can be used, as described in an earlier article on MakeUseOf, as a print driver for OmniFormat. However the full PDF995 suite of products has a whole range of functionalities that makes dealing with PDF formatting very simple.

Converting Anything To PDF Format

The power to convert any single document or image to PDF format becomes apparent once you start using the simple PDF995 print driver. For example, many businesses have a limited number of licenses for proprietary programming software like Visual Basic or Visio for graphical design. However, while you’re programming, you may find the need to show what you’re working on to a colleague or your boss who may not have the software installed. The easiest way to do this is by converting your work to a PDF file by printing it out to the PDF995 print driver.

For example, in manufacturing automation, engineers create screens on industrial Panelview units by using special Allen Bradley software to do so. This software is much like other graphical user interface design software, but in order to see the screens in design mode, you need to have the software. If your boss asks to see the latest screen that you’re working on, you can do so by printing it to PDF995 as shown below.

Within the printer list, you’ll find the “PDF995″ driver. Select that driver and print the file. The free version of the software will display a sponsor ad for about 20 seconds, and then after asking you where to save the PDF file, PDF995 automatically displays the PDF file within Adobe Acrobat.

This works for any program that you might be working with that allows you to print, including any special proprietary programming software, machine processor logic, or even graphic design programs.  By printing to a simple PDF file, you can attach the file and email your work to anyone you like, or publish it on the web as a downloadable file.

The Additional Features Of PDFedit995

When you download and install the PDFedit995 add-on, the features of this software extend far beyond just converting images and documents to a PDF file. The PDFedit995 application lets you do things like combining multiple docs to a single PDF file, automatically inserting links into the PDF, converting PDF’s back to HTML or Word Doc format, and it even provides integration with the Microsoft Word toolbar.

For example, just the other day I downloaded a PDF manual titled “How to Access MySQL with PHP.”  The manual is great, but in PDF format I can’t edit it or make use of any of the highlighting or notation functions that most word processors offer. With PDFedit995, it’s a breeze to convert any e-book in PDF format over to a Microsoft Word document or even into a HTML file.  Although converting to a Word document will not convert the images from the PDF document, converting the PDF to HTML format will.

All you need to do is start PDFedit995, click on the “Text” tab, and then click on the button labeled “Convert PDF to Word or HTML.” The following screen will appear.

In my case, I want to convert the PDF e-book on PHP programming to a Word document. So I browse to where I’ve saved the PDF file and then click on “Convert the document.” If you de-select the “Include Images” checkbox, the program will automatically convert the PDF to both HTML and Word formats. The Word format is great if you just need the text extracted from the PDF in an editable form. However, if you’re more concerned with formatting and including the images, the HTML format is best, as shown below.

In addition to this useful conversion utility, PDFedit995 also offers the ability to:

• Combine multiple existing word documents into a single PDF
• Automatically inserts hyperlinks
• Integrates with the Microsoft Word toolbar
• Add stationary (such as backgrounds or headers) to your PDF documents

How to Use Signature995

When you install the Signature995 add-on application, PDF995 will offer a few additional tabs that expand its functionality to include the ability to stamp each page, for example with the word “CONFIDENTIAL.”

Stamping pages can be very useful in a business environment where uncontrolled copies need to be identified on every page with “UNCONTROLLED COPY,” or in government offices where the classification level of the documents need to be identified on every page.

Other PDF Conversion Tools

PDFedit995 is just one of many PDF conversion tools that are available for free. It does have the annoyance of a sponsor pop-up window every time you use it. So if that tries your patience a little too much, consider some of the other tools we’ve covered on MakeUseOf before, such as doPDF for converting documents to PDF or tools like PDF Split and Merge. There were also a couple of lists posts such as cool PDF tools and simple PDF apps.

Which application you choose really depends on your specific PDF needs and what kind of features you’re looking for.

Do you have any favorite PDF tools or applications that convert anything to pdf? Tell us about it in the comments section!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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