File Conversion Services - Blog

Every received a file on your mobile phone that you can’t open because your phone doesn’t offer file viewer for particular formats? For example, the BlackBerry cannot read Visio or Docx formats. You can get your file formats converted via email by using these five email addresses. :

What you need to do is send your files (like DOCX, PDF, MP3, etc) as email attachments to the address of the conversion service and you’ll get them back in converted formats almost instantly. Incidentally, this is not just for mobile phones, you can do it from your computer also.

• mp3@koolwire.com - Convert WAV to MP3 format (file limit: 10 MB)
• iPhone@pdfonline.com - Convert Microsoft Visio (VSD) and Word 2007 (DOCX) to PDF. You can send multiple file formats in the same email and the converted PDF documents will arrive in separate emails.
• pdf@koolwire.com - Convert DOC, XLS or PPT files to PDF
• doc@koolwire.com - Convert PDF to Word or RTF
• wav@koolwire.com - Convert MP3 Songs to WAV files

This useful tip comes courtesy of http://www.labnol.org

Just a quick post to wish all my readers a Happy and Prosperous New Year as we launch into 2008.  May the new year bring you good fortune and success.

While this is not a file conversion issue, I thought you might find it interesting. I work a lot with Excel files and occasionally I need to open more than one file and compare them side by side. I have two monitors set up for when I have really big projects going and it’s a convenient way to manipulate the two files side by side.

The difficulty that I have run into is that Excel will not allow you to separate two open files so that you can view them on separate monitors. While you can compare them side by side on the same monitor, this is not always sufficient because you can’t manipulate the separate files or navigate them with ease. You also have a very narrowed view of each file.

Here is where Open Office once again comes to the rescue! What I simply do is open the one Excel file in Excel and the other in Open Office, and then drag one onto my second monitor, and viola! I have a perfect setup to independently manipulate the two files, having a full screen view of each. Given that Open Office Calc has the same functionality as Excel, this has so far proved to be the workable solution for working on two Excel files at the same time. And best of all, ofcourse, is the Open Office is completely free!

FYI, Word allows you the ability to separate two open files onto to separate monitors. For some reason Microsoft did not see fit to allow Excel to do this too!

I’ve discussed the usefulness of Open Office in my previous post Extracting slides from a Power Point presentation file.

Bill sent me an email today asking if there was a way to convert a OneNote 2007 file into a OneNote 2003 file. I haven’t had anyone ask me this before so I had to do a little research to find the answer.

The short answer is this - No, there is no direct way to convert from OneNote 2007 to OneNote 2003. The two file formats are completely incompatible. But there is a workaround. It’s tedious but it’s a workaround. Here are two ways to go about it:

1. Open your file in OneNote 2007 and then copy and paste the notes to OneNote 2003.
2. Save the OneNote 2007 file as a single web page (under Save As - *.mht). Make sure you select the appropriate range of pages that you need. You can then move this mht file to the computer that has OneNote 2003, open it in your browser, and copy and paste into OneNote 2003.
3. You can send copies of selected pages in an e-mail message. When you do this, the selected notes are copied into the body of the HTML message. The other pages of the section will not be viewable. Additionally, a .one file is attached to the e-mail message. This file attachment can be removed from the e-mail message as appropriate for your situation.

For more detailed instructions on how to do this, go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923307.

The problem with these workarounds is that they assume that you have access to an installation on OneNote 2007, because to do any of the above, you must first open your files up in OneNote 2007. If you do have access, say on someone else’s computer, then all is well and good. But if you don’t, then one option, and honestly this is the only one I can think of at the moment, is to download and install the trial version of OneNote 2007 (http://us20.trymicrosoftoffice.com/product.aspx?re_ms=oo&family=onenote&culture=en-US) and use it to access the notes. Make sure you get all the info you need before the trial period is over.

IMPORTANT: Please retain the previous version’s physical media in the event you wish to revert to that version during the trial period. Make sure that you have access to your OneNote 2003 install disk for reverting back to 2003 after the trial period is over. Your best bet might be to install the trial version on another machine if you have access to one.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t sound like Microsoft has any intention of making a converter available for OneNote 2007, so if this is a program that you absolutely must have, it may be worth thinking about upgrading to 2007. I will be researching some more on this, and if I find another better solution I will post it here, so keep checking in.

Good luck Bill, let us know how it works out for you, and if you find another solution please do come back and share it with us.

Yesterday I talked about converting docx files, but I neglected to cover what to do if you’re working on a Mac. A reader kindly pointed that out to me via email, so here I am correcting my “window-centricity”.

If you have a Mac, you have some of the same options as I mentioned yesterday. You can get the conversion done online, or you can pay someone (me preferably) to do it for you.

But, Microsoft does have a solution for you, it’s the Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 0.2 (beta). You can check on the page to see when the beta version expires so as to have make sure you have the latest version. As of this writing, the current version 0.2 expires December 31, 2007. Once installed, you can set the Converter to autoupdate so that it will update itself to ensure you have the latest version. Just open the Office Open XML Converter, and then on the Help menu, click “Check for Updates”.

This version of the converter can convert the following Office Open XML file formats:

• Word Document (*.docx)
• Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
• PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx)
• PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx)
• PowerPoint Template (*.potx)

As always, always check your converted file for integrity before discarding the original, especially because this converter is currently in beta, which means Microsoft won’t be offering any technical support with this.

Things to keep in mind:

You need to use Office 2004 11.3.4 or later, or Office v. X 10.1.9 or later to open converted documents. The minimum requirements for running this converter are:Operating system: Mac OS X 10.4.8 (Tiger) or a later version of Mac OS

If you’re like many of us, you may have been caught off-guard when colleagues, instructors or students started sending you Word documents with a docx extension. As you have probably discovered by now, these documents won’t open in any previous versions of Word. But you’re not completely out of options, there are several solutions, none of them perfect, that will allow you to view your documents.

If you have a previous version of Office installed, you can open docx files by downloading and installing the Microsoft Compatibility Pack which is available free on the Microsoft website. To use this compatibility pack, for users of Office XP and 2003, there are important security updates that you must first install, so make sure your updates are up-to-date. The requirements for using the Compatibility pack are outlined below:

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP Service Pack 1

• Recommended Microsoft Office programs:
  • Microsoft Word 2000 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2000 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2000 with Service Pack 3
  • Microsoft Word 2002 with Service Pack 3, Microsoft Excel 2002 with Service Pack 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 with Service Pack 3
  • Microsoft Office Word 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 with at least Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003 with at least Service Pack 1
  • Microsoft Office Word Viewer 2003
  • Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003
  • Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer 2003

Your second option is to get the conversion done online. There are two free conversion websites I can recommend. One is the docx converter and the other is Zamzar. Of these two, I have only used Zamzar, but I have heard that docx converter is pretty good, so it might be worth a try.

As always, remember, if all else fails, or you just don’t want to go through the trouble, contact us and we’ll do it for you at a reasonable fee.

When you have a file created in Excel or Access and you want to convert this into a sql file, it can be a headache getting from A to B.  As far as I know, this is not a straightforward “click and convert” process, but one that you have to put some thought into.

If you’re an expert coder, you can write a script in PHP that will do the job for you, but if you’re not, you may not be able to accomplish this with much ease.  I have tried a few converting programs that claim to do the job but I always end up having to open my sql file afterwards and do edits to make it do what I wanted it to do.

The one way to do it that will guarantee that you end up with a sql file that does exactly what you want it to do the way you want it to do it is to create the sql file yourself.  There is a step by step tutorial at The Coding Pad that walks you through the process of converting a csv file to sql.  It’s a four part tutorial, and instead of posting a link to each post separately, I will point you to the summary (From csv to sql - in brief) from where you can find the links to the four individual parts.

I have used this process myself many times and it’s never failed. You do need to have an idea how to interact with your server, but the explanation is pretty straightforward.

If you have any comments, or know any programs that work really well, please leave a comment here so that I can check it out. And if you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them.

One of the things I get people asking to me to do most often is to convert a scanned document into an editable text document in a format such as Microsoft Word. In this post I will go through a simple algorithm to get this task done that you can do for yourself without spending any money.

When a document is scanned in a scanner, the default output is an image of the scanned page. In some of the more recent scanners, you can specify your settings so that the scanner reads the document straight into a Word or Excel file. But sometimes you don’t have that option. What you need is a way to convert that scanned image into a text file, and the technology that does this is called “Optical Character Recognition” or OCR for short.

The OCR program will take your scanned image and attempt to read it to get you the best estimate of the original in text format. You then save the output and check it against the original for integrity.

Most OCR programs work pretty well., and the accuracy of the output, in my experience, is dependent on two main factors:

1. The clarity of the scanned image - as long as the original scanned file (image) is clear and of a high resolution the output will be good. The higher the resolution, the better the match.
2. Font size - The other factor that comes into play is the size of the font. The larger the font on your image the higher the accuracy will be.

There are several different OCR programs. I will list a few for you:

1. Simple OCR - One of the ones I have used before and would recommend for simple jobs is Simple OCR. This is a free program with a good OCR engine.
2. Abbyy Finereader 8.0 Professional - This is my personal favorite, and the one that I use most often. ABBYY FineReader has a powerful OCR engine, and a lot of features and options to work with different files. I find it to have very good accuracy even with documents that aren’t very clear. It’s also good with pdf files.
3. Readiris Pro 11 - This is yet another popular OCR program which I recommend. Has great features also.
4. Other popular options that I have not used include ScanSoft OmniPage 15 OCR and Textbridge Pro 11.

A glance at these programs will show you that they are somewhat costly to purchase, so you would need to decide if you do enough conversion to justify the cost.

And remember, if you just want someone to do the task for you, contact us, it’s what we do.

Supposing you have a powerpoint file that’s already been packaged into a presentation file and you need to extract one or more slides to reuse or to edit. How do you go about doing this? I answered this question on a forum recently.

Well, the solution is a simpe and free one. As you may have found, you may not be able to open this file in Microsoft Powerpoint as an ordinary file but only as a presentation.

The best solution is to download and install a copy of Open Office. OpenOffice is a multiplatform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. Compatible with all other major office suites, the product is free to download, use, and distribute.

Installation is easy and it works on Mac, Windows, and *nix. Open your presentation file using Open Office Impress, and then you can extract your slides from here, or save it as a Microsoft Power Point file to edit and use.

And, Open Office is good for a lot of other stuff too, so keep it installed, you won’t regret it.

Have you ever received a file attachment and realized you had no idea how to open and read it? This is a more common problem than most people realize, and this is why File Conversion Services exists.

There are numerous file formats out there, and many times users have files in formats that they can’t use. While there is a lot of proprietary software to create and convert file formats, more often than not the cost of buying these programs is prohibitive, especially if you only need to convert the one file.

File Conversion Services exists for this purpose, to help clients deal with file formats and have their information and data in a format that they can use. So the next time you receive that file attachment and can’t use it because it’s in a format that you can’t open, talk to us, and we will help you out.

We offer conversion between many different formats as listed on our File Conversion Page, and we are constantly adding new formats, so tell us what format you have and we will see if we have the tools to help you out at an affordable price.