Librarians Do It Quietly

I really like Zamzar.com because it's very intuitive. The directions couldn't be easier. The important thing is the ability to transfer to and from many different file formats. For example, if someone were to come in with a text document created in OpenOffice but all we have at the library is Microsoft Word, we can use Zamzar to convert the file to Word, edit it, and then use Zamzar again to convert it back to OpenOffice. The only issue here is that you need an email address to do it. However, I find many people who don't have an email address are willing to get a free Gmail or Yahoo! account. Even if they don't, in this type of situation I would be willing to use my own email address if it's a one-time thing.

I found the conversion of text files to PDF to be fairly quick, which is nice. I also tried converting a spreadsheet (created with OpenOffice) to PDF, which was good except that the gridlines didn't show up. To test the speed I tried my 20 page paper that I wrote in my Freshman English class in college (plus 1 page Works Cited), converting from a DOC to a PDF (59MB) and a short video file (74MB), both under the 100MB file size limit. The PDF file arrived in my email almost instantly. The MPG-to-AVI conversion was not so quick, but did arrive in under five minutes.

Overall I think this site is definitely going to come in handy, so I bookmarked it. For some reason it reminds me of yousendit.com a bit in theory... even though that one doesn't do conversions.