Recommended by David

A friend, who I met at the Internet Success Bootcamp in London last year, has recently sent me a copy of her new e-book to review. It’s a delightful book for children, but that is incidental to my reason for writing this. My friend’s e-book was accompanied by a questionnaire for me to fill in regarding the e-book: my likes, dislikes and other comments etc.

The questionnaire caused me a problem: I couldn’t open it! The document had the suffix “.docx”, which I hadn’t come across before.

On investigation, I discovered that this type of document is generated by Microsoft Word 2007 and earlier versions of Word cannot open them. (Yet another reason for me to dislike Word!) I always have preferred Lotus WordPro, but have a version of Office 2000 on my p.c. so that I can (usually!) open Word documents sent to me. But, clearly, this old version was not going to be of any use to me this time: I needed a file conversion tool that would convert docx files.

The solution: I came upon “Zamzar”, which promotes itself as “a great new service that allows you to convert your computer files online for free”.

There are 4 steps to the process:

1. browse your p.c. for the file you wish to convert (in my case, I wanted to convert docx)
2. from the drop down list, choose which kind of file you want the original converted to (about 60 options, including image, document, music and video formats)
3. enter your e-mail address to receive the converted files
4. check the “Terms”, if you wish, and click the “Convert” button

Shortly afterwards (my file conversion from docx only took a few minutes), you will receive an e-mail from Zamzar with a link for you to download the converted file, but note that all files will be stored for just one day from receipt of this e-mail.

Please note that I have currently only used Zamzar to convert docx files and I have not tested any other file conversion, but it was straightforward to use, free, and did the job.

You can check it out at http://www.zamzar.com

I’d be interested in hearing of your experiences if you have used Zamzar, particularly if you have used it for any type of file conversion other than docx.