THERE’S nothing too flashy about the websites that we’re looking at this week, but they can be awfully useful in helping you perform specific tasks that might otherwise take you quite a bit of time and effort. Best of all, unlike utility software, these web-based services won’t require you to install anything at all on your PC. Just visit them with your browser.
Download a YouTube video. Want to save a YouTube video to your hard disk for offline playback? There are dozens of websites that will let you do this, but ClipConverter (www.clipconverter.cc) is one of the best I’ve seen so far. Unlike other sites, ClipConverter.cc gives you the option of converting the video into common formats (MP4, 3GP, AVI or MOV for videos) or simply extracting the audio (which can be saved in MP3, M4A or AAC formats). Just paste the URL of the video you want to capture, choose the options you like and click continue to begin uploading the video to ClipConverter for conversion. When it’s done, just click on the Download button to save a copy of the video or audio to your local drive.
Split a PDF file. If you’d like to split a PDF file into one or more pages, you can do it free at PDFSplit (www.splitpdf.com). Just upload the file to the website and indicate how you want the document broken up.
Convert PDF table to a spreadsheet. We’ve all been there before. A report in PDF format contains a table of data we need to manipulate. But how do we get to the table that’s been frozen into the PDF document? The website PDFTables (https://pdftables.com) will do the trick quick and easy. If you only need to do this from time to time, it’s no sweat. PDFTables lets you convert up to 25 pages for free without having to open an account. If you sign up with an e-mail address, you get 50 more pages free.
Do ANYTHING with PDF files. If you prefer all your PDF eggs in one basket, check out Smallpdf (smallpdf.com). Here you can compress, merge, split, rotate, unlock or protect a PDF file or convert popular file formats (PowerPoint, JPG, Excel, and Word) to PDF and vice versa.
Send large files. Websites that let you send documents too big to e-mail have grown up quite a bit since YouSendIt made its debut in 2004. The company has since renamed itself to Hightail and has added sharing, collaboration, and project management features, but the maximum file size on its free service is a paltry 250MB. If all you need to do is send a larger file for free, any of the services in the table below will do the trick better. Some sites will ask you to sign up first; others won’t. Be aware that the files expire after a while (usually 10 days) so your recipient should move quickly. Other sites also limit the number of times a file can be downloaded.
Calculate the duration between two dates. Counting the number of days between two dates can be tricky and surely tedious. Timeanddate.com (www.timeanddate.com) will do the counting for you and a bunch of other time- and date-related tasks. To calculate the duration between two dates, go to the site’s Calculators menu and choose Date to Date Calculator.
Find out your IP address. Just go to WhatIsMyIP (www.whatismyip.com) to find out!
Copy and paste special characters. CopyPasteCharacter (www.copypastecharacter.com) solves my usual struggle with locating the Spanish character “ñ.” On top of that, it will let you copy and paste a whole slew of other special characters.
Appear busy. Okay, IdleKeyboard (http://idlekeyboard.com) isn’t all that useful, but it’s amusing and may come in handy when you want to appear busy at the office. All it does is loop the sound of typing so that anyone outside your cubicle hearing it will think you’re hard at work. Chin Wong
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