Zamzar

Similar to last week’s short-and-sweet article, this week’s featured service is Zamzar, a simple and easy-to-use service that lets you convert files to different formats. Simply upload your files on the Web site and tell Zamzar what format you want to want, and you get a link in your e-mail to download the converted file. Zamzar works with document, image, sound, and video files, and it supports almost every format you can think of.

Zamzar can be extremely useful, even if you already have some conversion tools available. For example, I can use iTunes to convert the iTunes files to mp3’s, but Zamzar will let me do it without iTunes, and I can convert it to almost any audio file. You could convert a WordPerfect document into Word format. Zamzar is particularly useful for video formats, which can be very complicated. Without any fancy software, you can take a YouTube file and convert it to a m4a file to watch on your iPod.

Zamzar has a file size limit of 100 MB, but there is no limit to how many files you can convert. It doesn’t even require registration. Zamzar probably won’t change your life, but if you’ve ever tried to convert an audio or video file into a format you can use, you can appreciate how easy Zamzar makes this process. It’s the kind of service you forget about for a while, but when you need it, it comes in handy. So try it out and keep it in mind — it will make things a lot easier.