Saturday, March 31, 2007

Exciting News!

(especially for Easter)


Disclaimer: This is NOT a pregnancy announcement, nor have I won the lottery (darn it!)

Today I discovered a cool new tool online - a free PDF converter. It means that I am able to make available Lizzie's Home original articles, spreadsheets and other documents as PDF downloads direct from this site. I'm really chuffed I have worked this out - I have big plans for using this feature, including writing my own ebook (its even in my 100 Things post - see? Number 82!) It offers up a whole new way of sharing with the world my infinite wisdom - grin - and not only that, I'm now able to control the way in which my documents are handled on the opposite end. Up until now, I haven't known how to make the templates and articles widely available without the question of plagiarism or misuse by others being forefront in my mind.

So, pleased as punch, I offer you the first installment in what I hope will be a regularly updated feature here at Lizzie's Home. Look in the sidebar to the left for available articles and downloads - you're free to save these files to your own computers and to link back to them. Enjoy.

Cheers,
Lizzie

4 comments:

Jenn @ Frugal Upstate said...

Hello! I'd be really interested in that PDF converter. There have been times that I've wanted to offer at template or a form etc and didn't know how to do it. If you wouldn't mind sharing your source I'd appreciate it-

frugalupstate@yahoo.com

Lizzie said...

Sure thing Jenn :)

I did a bit of a Google search and came up with this site:

http://www.primopdf.com/

Download (via www.download.com - follow the link from the above page) was really simple. Everything worked as it should, which is quite amazing considering I still can't figure out how to put a third column in my blog from the various online tutorials out there :P

The program converts most applications to PDF format. So I simply opened a Word document, clicked 'Print' in the file menu (after the PrimoPDF installation of course), and where a window would usually pop up with your default printer already selected, you should be able to scroll down the drop-down menu and see 'PrimoPDF listed as an option. Click on that, follow the prompts, and away you go :)

It also gives you the option to enable a few security settings, such as allowing, or dis-allowing users to edit the text, though I haven't tried that one yet. I did a few quick conversions from Excel as well, and they worked just as fine, although part of the appeal with my Excel spreadsheets is that they are customisable and automatically calculate totals based on what you input into the cells, so PDFs would remove that. However DH gave me a crash course in document protection (locking) this afternoon so there are still ways to get around that! Though I must admit, after thirty minutes of having him explain that way to me I still think this PDF conversion do-dad is easier to work out, at least for straight out text documents!

Hope that helps a little? If you have any more questions, don't hesitate to drop me a line: lizzie0259@hotmail.com

Cheers,
Lizzie

Kin said...

So, Lizzie, how's that study going? hehehe. Bought the same as mine I suspect!

Lizzie said...

Oh shoosh.

I am 'networking' at the moment!

Cheers,
Lizzie

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