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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In the world of web apps, the name refers to this Firefox add-on which just might save you a few cusswords and more than a few joules of energy if and when your browser goes down with all your typed data in it. And sometimes it’s like a breath of new life.

Oh well there are a lot of add-ons with a five star rating. Why do I choose to write about this minuscule 99KB application? Simply because I think the attribute of this add-on should be a default function in all browsers.

Imagine the chore of filling out a lengthy web form and submitting it, only to see your browser crash or some error message pop up. Our choice name callings won’t bring the data back – but Lazarus will. Lazarus lets us recover all that data with a single click.

The 99KB Firefox add-on saves whatever we type in any text field within the Firefox browser- blog entries, blog comments, online email, forum posts and online forms, etc. It automatically saves the data we enter into a form field during the process, and also saves the entire form with the hit of the submit button.

If some accidental error happens and the data needs to be resent, we just need to go back to that page again, right-click in one of the fields in the form, or just within the part of the web page that the form occupies, and choose Recover form from the menu. Lazarus restores the data in the form and we are on the go again.

Is the form data secured?

The best thing is that all the data is stored locally on the hard drive. Lazarus uses a SQLite database which encrypts and stores the data. This database is stored within the default Profile (C:\Documents and Settings\<username.\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profile) folder in the system.

For extra protection there’s a master password which has to be given before Lazarus can save or restore any web form. An additional setting can be configured to delete the form data after a set period. Lazarus also gets added in the Clear Private Data options box of Firefox. As Lazarus can also save passwords, this triple barrelled security is always desirable.

Lazarus configuration settings can be accessed from Menu – Tools – Add-ons-Extensions OR from the Ankh icon on the lower right of the Firefox browser. Version 1.0.5 is available for download from the Firefox Add-on site or from the developer site here. It is compatible with Firefox 2.0 to 3.1b3.

Even as web forms get better at auto-saving entered fields, losing our just entered data is a situation we encounter often during our web surfing. This is where Lazarus comes in handy with its one click headache curer. Do you think this Firefox add-on is a must have in our browser arsenal? Add your opinions below.

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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’s the one thing they have in common?

They all have downloadable PDF forms.

You want to join the gym? Here’s a PDF form for you to fill and you’re all set to go!
Would you like to study in our university? Fill in this PDF form and send it back to us.
You have to renew your passport? Here’s an application form for you.

How often have you had to download online forms in PDF format, print them to fill out, rescan and send them off? Such a hassle isn’t it? There’s a way to edit and fill in your application forms without printing them out.

Formulatepro allows you to overlay text and images on PDF documents so you can edit them on the fly, fill out your forms and send them off again. All within the time it takes to warm up your printer.

You can add text and as usual, you can customize its font, size and colour. You can also add shapes overlay (squares, circles) and scribbles (which is useful because then you can add your signature on the form).

One cool thing with formulatepro is the ability to add crosses. This comes in very handy as most forms have boxes to cross out. You can also overlay images onto the form, if you have a scanned image of your signature then it may be easier to insert rather than having to scribble it each time. You can also insert your photo if the form requires it.

formulatepro is very “online form” orientated. I guess it was built to help you fill in those forms, but don’t forget that you can edit just about any PDF document with it.

Saving as a PDF file is a little bit tricky. It’s not very straightforward because merely clicking on ‘Save’ will save the file as “.formulate” so it can’t be read by any other programs. Choosing ‘Print’ instead and on the following window click on ‘PDF’ and ‘Save as PDF’ will evidently save it as a PDF.

If you’re looking for a PDF editor with more features, Skim is a great application which will add “stickies” to your PDF, along with other shapes and can let you easily underline and strikeout text.

formulatepro and Skim are both free and are OS X only.

Do you have any favourite alternatives you’d like to share?

(By) Jackson Chung is a full-time medical student attempting to perform a juggling act with relationships, studies and his future.

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While doing my undergraduate studies, sometimes I had to spend hours on creating simple survey forms, hence I know how time consuming and irritating the process can be. Wufoo can help you build good quality online forms, surveys, invitations and etc. It does not end here, service also does a great job at processing and managing forms. You can check out different form examples and have tour though account user interface here and here, respectively. Wufoo provides good all-in-one feature set, letting person not only to create forms but also easily manage and analyze data obtained from it. It is even possible to create complete customer management system.

There are many people who can benefit from this tool considerably. I think it may be especially useful for teachers, students or people involved in a job that requires to carry out regular customer surveys and monitore custumer behaviour. From the wide variety of subscription models available, I assume that the demand for this service exists in many corporate sectors as well. Below I have included excerpt from the Wufoo’s website

Basically, the possibilities are endless, but here’s a short list of things to give you an idea of Wufoo’s versatility:

• Contact Form
• Mailing List
• Survey
• Job Application
• Workshop Registration
• Event Calendar
• Account Management
• Customer Management
• Bug Tracker
• Invitations / RSVP
• Online Orders
• Wedding Planner
• Address Book
• Home Finances
• Classifieds
• Personal Journal
• Quizzes / Tests
• Media Collection

For sign-up you need only email. Service has 5 different pricing options(check here) including free option. Free service option is limited to 3 forms/month, 3 reports/month and 100 entries. This amount should be enough for non-business use. If you need more then that you will need to subscribe to one of the premium accounts priced between $9 to $199/month,depending on the number of forums required.

Another couple of web based companies that offer similar onlne tools are Form Assembly and WyaCracker. If you know any other similar services let me know.

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