Often we create documents in word, but when we share them and want them to be printable documents or forms, it’s easier to change your word document to a pdf file.

Many of our clients do not have software to convert documents with, so I went online to see how difficult it would be to do for free. It’s not hard at all. If you have a lot of documents to do, buy software, but if you just need to convert now and then, the free online version works fine. There are lots of places to go, I only tried one.

Click on the image below to view my short video:

Watch the video now!

“If it’s not in my Outlook – it doesn’t exist.”
That was life in 2001 or so, but now I have completely weened myself from Outlook. I stopped using Outlook due to the spam I received. I hate learning new software, so it’s always easier to hang on to what your familiar with, and I’ve been doing just that for years. I used Word, Excel, Act and Outlook when I worked for Big Biz. So when we started our own business, we just used familiar software. First Act had to go, and guess what – in just a few years Outlook followed, and recently I decided not to install Microsoft Office either.

Open Office is free, and I don’t really use it that much any more. Most of my conversations is email, twitter or IM based, and if I need to write a text document I often end up using Google docs so I can share it with my group. I have installed Irfan and Gimp, but I still use Photoshop. I just don’t bother to open Photoshop to just resize a picture for example. And the other day, I started thinking about getting rid of my old, trusted friend Quickbooks. A small business like ours doesn’t have pay roll, we don’t keep inventory and Quickbook is probably overkill.

Now I don’t think everything can be free, but lately I find myself more open to trying a new solution instead of going with the old familiar choice. Things change so quickly in technology. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time I actually had sleepless nights over the fact that we had to switch to Adobe InDesign for our graphics work instead of using my old friend Quark Xpress.
Please…

Nowadays I tell my kids “if it’s not in the Family Google Calendar, it doesn’t exist”!

* How to Make Facebook Useful Again on www.readwriteweb.com by Sarah Perez

For us, Google Docs has been the solution to keep our projects on track and the group informed. It’s easy to share documents and work on a piece of text together. You can also share the action item list so that everyone can access it. Nowadays, we rely on Google docs to keep all our projects organized.

Watch this short video to quickly find out how easy it is to get started.

There are two ways to send and receive email. You can use an email program installed on your computer, like Outlook or Eudora, or you can use an online web mail account such as gmail, yahoo or hotmail.

Many people have lots of websites and lots of email addresses to keep up with. For example, you might use one email address for your private email, and another email address for your business.

We prefer using gmail. It’s easy, and you can always get to your email even when you’re traveling. I also like the fact that I can set up gmail to automatically label my email or toss it directly into folders for me. It makes it easy if you can color-code or label incoming mail; sort it in folders and so on.

Lately, I’ve started to use gmail as my GTD organizer. I label things according to actions needed, such as next-action, waiting, to do etcetera. It works well for me.

The rules function in gmail  is just awesome. Some of my customer service requests I automatically forward to our customer service representative for example. My son’s soccer schedule automatically forwards to him.

I used outlook for a very long time, and it has some great functions with mail merge and group emails and so on. But I have to say, that gmail can do most things just as well. I create groups frequently. For example, I have created a group for soccer parents in our car pool group. Whenever I need to send out a schedule change or something, I just send a quick email to the group instead.

Another big reason I started using gmail was the problem we had with spam. When I used outlook I constantly had to spend time fighting the virus problems and sort a lot of spam. The problem with getting viruses on my computer completely disappeared when we started with gmail. Also, the spam filter is excellent. I hardly see any spam anymore.

You can take the tour and find out if this is a solution for you by clicking here.