I’m a big fan of webware and Zamzar.com is a tremendously useful website that’s allows you to convert files into different formats, all online and all for free. It supports a huge number of formats including different media formats for images, sound and video plus other files like Office documents (2007 & earlier versions) as well as zip, tar, rar and other archive files. It even does half-decent PDF to DOC conversion.
The process couldn’t be simpler. You just browse for the file you want to convert, select the format you want it to turn into and enter your email address. Once you hit the convert button, the file will upload and moments later you will receive an email with the converted file attached.
You can also add a bookmark that you can click anytime you are on a site that has a file you want to convert, a YouTube video for example, so you can just click your bookmark and it will search the page for any files that can be downloaded and converted.
There are a couple of issues to be considered though. Zamzar is still in Beta and the site does have some pop-up ads (most of which the Firefox pop-up blocker will take care of). Those are minor issues though and the ability to convert files without have to download and install specific software more than makes up for them.
