I’m often searching for free tools to convert between various file formats for clients, and frequently find “free” online converters.   Most of the time, these free converters have limited features or don’t actually work as advertised.

I was pleasantly surprised to find www.pdftoexcelonline.com after I was asked to convert a large PDF table into Excel format.   It’s simple to use – simply upload the PDF and wait for the resulting Excel file to be emailed back to you (only takes a few minutes).  

The results are pretty amazing, with formatting such as layout and colors all converted accurately.

www.pdftoexcelonline.com

There are two ways to do this:

1) Click on the Insert menu and select Symbol.   You can then select the Euro symbol.

2) Type Alt+0128

More details and instructions for other keyboards here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP052754081033.aspx

Have you ever wanted to open multiple PowerPoint or Excel windows, but found that they always open up within the one window?    Yes, you can look at two open files, but they’re always within the same window.

The problem is, Powerpoint and Excel limit one instance of the program to each logged-in user.   Here’s an inspired “bodge” to get around the limitation!

1) Create a new local user account, say “office”

2) Use the built in “runas” account to start the program as this new user:

runas /user:office “c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\powerpoint.exe”

You can do this with multiple usernames to create multiple instances!

Want to fix the top row of a spreadsheet in Excel so that when you scroll down, you can still see the column headings?

Click on the row beneath the column headings, and select Freeze Panes (on the view tab in 2007), and then Freeze Panes to lock the row above.