Teaching Comparative

Two useful tools

I promised to let you know what I learned while teaching this past week. Well, here are two valuable things for preparing teaching materials.

Ensode offers an online utility to unlock .pdf files so that you can copy sections of them or edit the contents.

Most .pdf files are locked so that you can't even sign a contract saved as a .pdf and send it back without downloading it, signing it, and scanning it back into an electronic document. (Unless you buy the professional version of Adobe's .pdf software.)

The Ensode utility allows you unlock the file so you can change it or copy parts of it into another document.

Go to this Ensode page, scroll down past the Google ads, and read the description.

Then scroll down a bit more and you'll find a entry box into which you enter the URL or location of the document (you can use the "Choose file" feature), check the "accept terms and conditions" box, and then submit the document.

An unlocked version of the document will appear in a new browser window from which you can save it, copy sections, or edit it before saving.

The utility is still in beta, but I used it several times without a glitch.

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Then there's the problem of MS Word 2008. The default setting to save documents produces a format with the suffix ".docx" which cannot be opened by earlier versions of Word.

So I'm cheap and happy with my 2004 version of Word, but some of my correspondents have new computers with the 2008 software. Unless they carefully choose to send me documents in the old ".doc" format, I can't open them.

But Zamzar can.

Go to the Zamzar site, "Choose" the file from your hard drive that you want to convert (It's not limited to Word documents; you can also choose images, music files, video files, or archived packages), and then select the type of file you want it converted to.

Finally, enter the e-mail address you want the converted file sent to, agree to the Zamzar's terms, and click on "Convert."

The converted document will be sent to you. It's easy.

I'll still ask people to send me ".doc" documents, but I won't have to ask them to send me something a second time because they didn't take a few seconds to choose that option when they saved.

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Labels: pedagogy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 4:34 PM