Searching High and Low

Part of my daily routine has me using Microsoft Word to create handouts, research guides, and fliers for the campus community. Sometimes I give these away in paper format, but more often I’m finding that many people are starting to prefer an electronic copy (that can be printed if they really need it). One of the problems I’ve found with distributing electronic copies of Word files is that the formatting and fonts used on my machine may not be the same as everyone else’s machine which can change how the file is rendered on the recipient’s machine. I can eliminate these issues by converting these files to PDF.

For those who don’t have a full version of Adobe Acrobat (US $299 – or less if you’re a student or faculty member), free options are available. Sure, you’ll have to sacrifice many of the advanced features that come with the Adobe product, but if you just want to distribute straight-forward Word documents, give this a try.

Zamzar.com

This online conversion site allows you to upload and convert the following types of files:

• documents
• images
• video
  
• and music

I experimented with a couple of rather complex MS Word files (featuring floating images, text boxes, images enclosed in text boxes, header & footer, URLs, arrows, and drop shadows) by uploading them to Zamzar along with my email address. About five minutes later, I was notified via email that my PDFs were ready to go. I clicked the link in my email notification and downloaded the zip file to my computer. The results were excellent. I was expecting some formatting problems with all of the floating text boxes and images in my Word file, but there were none.

I like the many conversion formats that Zamzar supports–it’s like a one-stop-shop for converting some of the more frequently used file formats. The site is still in beta so you may encounter some bugs along the way.