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TECH TIPS

These ideas help computer users at all levels navigate through the day more effectively.

How to Covert a PDF File to Word, Excel or JPG Format
Source: www.online-tech-tips.com

One common question is how to convert a PDF file to Microsoft Word format (doc), Excel format (xls) or JPG picture format. Converting to Word is pretty simple and can be done directly using an online file conversion service called Zamzar. Going to Excel or JPG is a two-step process, but nothing very difficult to follow.

Convert a PDF file to JPG – Easy Way
Go to ZamZar.com, browse for your file and choose PNG format for the format to convert to under Step 2. PNG is another newer picture format that is slowly replacing the JPG format. Most programs that can open JPG files can open PNG. Zamzar automatically converts each page in the PDF document into its own PNG picture file. Now you can simply open Microsoft Paint and choose File – Save As from the menu and choose JPEG from the drop down list of formats.

Convert PDF to JPG Format – Second Way
Download free software that converts PDF documents to JPEG image format automatically. Go to the Omniformat download page and download both Omniformat v8.3 and the PDF995 app. You will need to download and install PDF995 first before installing Omniformat. Once you have both programs installed, go to your Start Menu programs, find the program group Software995 and click on Omniformat.

Once the program is loaded, you’ll see it has a section called "Watch Folders" and then a button at the bottom titled "Start Monitoring" and "Single Pass."

Copy the PDF files you want to convert to JPG format to the C:\omniformat\watch folder and then press Single Pass. The program will look in that directory and convert each page of each PDF into a separate JPG file. If you click Start Monitoring, you can keep dropping PDFs into that folder and the program will automatically convert them into JPGs as long as the program is open. Note that the program deletes the original PDF document it uses, so that’s why you need to copy the PDF document to the watch folder.

Convert your PDF to a Word document
Go to Zamzar.com and click the Browse button next to Step 1 and choose your file. By default, Step 2 will be set to DOC format, but you can choose to convert your PDF to other file types such as TXT, HMTL, RTF, etc. Type in your email address for Step 3 and click Convert.

You should receive an email within a few minutes with a download link to your converted file.

Convert a PDF file to Excel format
Follow the steps using Zamzar, but choose TXT as the format you want to convert to. You can’t convert straight to Excel format, so go through the intermediary TXT format. Once you have downloaded the TXT file and saved it on your computer, open Microsoft Excel and go to File – Open and change the Files of Type combo box to All Files.

Now you should see the converted text file in the list of files. Choose it and click Open. You’ll now be brought to the Text Import Wizard. You have to open the file in this manner because if you simply right-click and say Open With Excel, all of the text for each row will appear in the first column and not be separated.

For Step 1, choose Delimited from the two options listed.

Click Next and check off the Space checkbox as one of the delimiters. Each value should now be separated by a vertical line, indicating it’s going to be in a separate column.

Click Next and then click Finish. You can now save the file as an Excel file by going to File – Save As. There are a few drawbacks, however, as this conversion does not always work perfectly. For example, if the original Excel sheet had a column where there was text with spaces included, each word will be separated into its own column! Also, you won’t see any formulas or functions that may have been in the original Excel sheet, only the text.