In a perfect world, every software application in the world will be able to open files created with any other application. You’d be able to create a file with whichever software you have, send it to your buddies and be sure that he/she will be able to view and edit the document in whichever application that they happen to have on their computer at that time.
But, this is not a perfect world. And different software applications save files in different formats that are, more often than not, incompatible with any other application. I’m sure all of you have at one some point in time received a file from a friend that you weren’t able to open because you didn’t have the required application installed.
Well, help is at hand.
In this post, we’ll be looking at some web based services for converting files from one format to the other, for free.
Zamzar is definitely one of the most popular file conversion services around. The fact that it supports almost every popular file format around is a big plus. Zamzar not only works with document formats like pdf, txt, doc, docx etc, it also lets you convert between image, audio, video and archiving formats. Not only that Zamzar asks for your email address and sends the converted files right to your inbox. How’s that for convenience ?
Vixy is a simple video conversion service. It takes in either a youtube URL or the URL to an .flv file (flash video) and lets you convert it to an MOV, AVI (DivX+MP3), 3GP or MP4 formats. That’s all – Plain and simple, but that is what is needed sometimes.
PDF to Word does exactly what the name suggests. This nifty and useful website takes in a PDF file and converts it to the Microsoft Word format, preserving the formatting of the original document. While the formatting is not always perfect, it is surprisingly accurate, and you have to use the service to really appreciate it. So, now whenever you need to convert a PDF document to a word document for editing, you know where to head to.
PDF-o-MATIC takes in the URL of a web page and converts it to PDF. That is all it does and it does it pretty well. The service uses the open source HTMLDOC tool for the actual conversion and so the only reason that you might not be able to convert your html page to pdf would be if the page contains HTML markup that HTMLDOC doesn’t understand.
Movavi online convert not only lets you convert but also merge upto 5 files together into a single file. The best thing about the service is that it supports a number of popular file formats including video for the iPod, iPhone and PSP. So, the next time you see a nice video on youtube and wish that you could have it on your iPod, you know where to head to. The only issue with Movavi is that when it gets a job to convert a file, it puts it into a queue and that queue, at times, can take quite a while to clear. But, Movavi provides an option to receive the converted file as an email, so I’d suggest that you use that option, if you don’t want to be staring at the computer screen for too long.
Have you ever needed to use any online file conversion service ? Do you have any favorite ones ?
Programmer, blogger and a geek making a living shifting bits around the Internet. Sharninder is the owner of Geeky Ninja
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Thanks for sharing. I have a few PDF files and need to convert them into Word so that I don’t have to hire some freelancers to retype them for me. But it seems that the online converters don’t support PDFs with restriction. Then I find AnyBizSoft to change PDF to Word, that works well.
Hey thanks so much! I didn’t know you could actually convert online.
I’ve been using Smart PDF Creator
to create PDFs, and I am happy with the program but I think the services that you have listed are very useful.