Category Archives: documents

Do you really need to buy a scanner?

Google DriveIf you work in an office where many document are daily processed you will appreciate one quick tip about using Google Drive as a on-the-go scanner. As you certainly know you can set Google Drive to always convert documents into Google Formats when you upload a new one. You can also decide to automate the process and Google will automatically convert the files without asking you again about it but, for my experience, it’s more more flexible and useful to define the conversion parameters every time I decide to upload a new document. For this reason I ticked the “Confirm settings before each upload” option in the upload menu.

One, not so known, feature is represented by the internal Google OCR that is able to read text also contained in jpg files. This means that you can simply take a picture of the text you want to modify and Google will convert it into a text file in few secs. During some test we made, a medium quality photograph is more than sufficient to have good results with Google OCR.

To activate this feature don’t forget to put a tick on the “Convert text from PDF and image files to Google documents” option and to specify the document language when you upload the jpg files into your Google Drive.  AddThis

How to publish and share nice pdf documents, newsletters or magazines using Scribd.com and Issuu.com

Issuu logoScribd LogoMore than one year ago we wrote a short post about creating pdf files using Openoffice (also in its portable version), now, in our Freeware Page, we would like to talk about two interesting Web 2.0 websites which allow you to publish and share your documents. On one hand, Scribd.com is an interesting website you can use to upload and share files in the following formats: Microsoft Word (doc, docx), Microsoft Powerpoint (ppt, pptx, pps), Microsoft Excel (xls, xlsx), PDF (pdf, ps), Open Office Documents (odt, odp, sxw, sxi, etc.), Images (jpg, png, gif, tiff) and Text Documents (txt, rtf). On the other hand, Issuu.com is very intuitive to use but very effective. Using Issuu you can upload a pdf files transforming it into a “cool magazine format”. In few words, you can modify, with just a click, your pdf file in a browsable magazine, with active links and notes. Moreover you can also insert your “brand new” magazine as a htlm widget directly in your blog or website. Recommended! AddThis mp3 link