doc | Advocate's Studio

I’m going to start the week off with something easy, something lightweight. But useful. Always useful around here. Need a quick way to convert document files? Try Zoho Viewer, one of the Zoho suite tools, mentioned here in the the Studio before. The primary use for the tool is to preview such docs and PDFs in your browser. But a cool add is the ability to convert docs there as well. Convert to the various document extensions as well as PDF. Zoho Viewer does not have the full panoply of extensions and doc versions, but it does an admirable job hitting the high points. Plus, it’s free and you don’t need to “sign up” for anything.

Check out Zoho Viewer’s conversion tool here.

: Image via Wikipedia

Now this is an interesting find: a search engine for PDFs, DOCs and PPTs. Hat tip to Simon Fodden over at Slaw for this gem, called Osun Document Search. The stipped-down, Google-like search page has a search box with buttons for PDFs, DOCs and PPTs. Results pages also look suspiciously similar to a Google page, except that they are populated exclusively with documents. Popular “hot docs” are listed on the right.

Mr. Fodden has devoted some time and energy into getting the back story on Osun and believes that it may be relying on Google’s own document search capabilities, and then merely re-packaging them into a document-only results format. In any event, the site is of value even if only for its format of cutting out the websites when you are only interested in documents.