Ever had a mental block while sitting at your computer? Ever wondered what software’s best for a particular task but don’t have the time to experiment?
Well, that’s happened a couple of times recently and set yours truly off on a quest for the best one use trial and free software packages to make the life of the small to micro-sized business just that little bit easier.
What sparked it all off was the need to create a wiring diagram to send to someone – a task that was, for me at least, a once in a blue moon occurrence. What would be the best option for creating this diagram from scratch?
A pencil, ruler and sheet of A4 that I could then scan in was one possibility. But I could do better than that on screen. Word was therefore opened by default, and then the thought struck that maybe MS Publisher would be better. More internal debate followed with the initial conclusion that for the end user a Word document using AutoShapes and drawing tools would be preferable to a Publisher document that can only be opened by the same version number.
Then again, a PDF document of the wiring diagram would be the most universally acceptable method of disseminating the information. The debate was going round in circles until I decided to search for wiring diagram software and found a trial version of SmartDraw. The seven-day trial was more than long enough to get to grips with the package and produce a moderately competent wiring diagram using the templates and clicking and dragging ready-made elements around the screen.
The resulting diagram could then be formatted as a PDF and Word document, or incorporated directly into PowerPoint or Excel. So long as placing anything you might wish to see in the bottom right hand corner is avoided, the trial version’s watermark could be lived with for a one-off. Certainly, for my needs the trial version was a lot cheaper than splashing out on either the full package of SmartDraw or the even more expensive Visio. *
Within days, though, I was staring at my screen again with a mental block over how to convert a web page into a PDF. This is something I know how to do, and have done before. But, for the life of me, I just couldn’t remember in exactly the same way I very occasionally stumble into a momentary blankness over how to spell should and could. (Having revealed that I’m now worried no-one else will own up to this textual tic.)
Several moments later it dawned that all I had to was go Ctrl P to print and change the default printer to PDFCreator, an Open Source printer driver that outputs a wide range of Windows documents in PDF format including, happily, web pages. Another free one that’s highly rated is PrimoPDF.
Later, I also discovered an interesting piece of JavaScript from freepdfconvert.com that you add to the code of a web page. This places a Save page as PDF button that visitors can click to create a PDF of the page to print off. Nice.
Or, if you go in the freepdfconvert front door, there is the ability to upload a file directly to the site and have them email you back a PDF version. Naturally, there are usage limitations without subscription.
These are just a few of the many thousand of results “PDF conversion” throws up by the search engines. One further notable is OpenOffice, the free open source rival to MS Office, which includes the foolproof capability to export documents created in OpenOffice to PDF.
* Typically, a week too late I discovered, completely by accident, Open Source software called Dia which can draw a wide variety of diagrams, from circuits to flowcharts and entity-relationship models.
Next time: How to never (legally) spend money on software again
