Today I want to let you know about two tools I’ve come across recently that have made a big difference to my business productivity. Strangely they both begin with Z ….
Have you ever been emailed a file that you can’t open? It’s happened to me plenty of times. Authors often send me their manuscripts in Pages format, which were created on a Mac – but as I am a Windows user I can’t open them. In the past I’ve had to do things as crazy as email them to a Mac-owning friend and ask them to open the file and copy-and-paste the text into an email – which is just mad, and a waste of everyone’s time. But this week I came across Zamzar, which claims to offer conversion of over 1200 file types, from documents and images to audio and video files and more. I’ve tried a couple of conversions and it’s been a quick, painless and free solution! Definitely worth bookmarking the site at www.zamzar.com.
The other service is Zapier, which is an automation system with literally hundreds of uses. For example, when I ran my webinar the other week I had people sign up via a MailChimp form. Normally I’d then have to add the details to GoToWebinar manually, which was taking a lot of time, but using Zapier I could set up a command for it to happen automatically … and it worked seamlessly! I haven’t even begun exploring the power of what Zapier can do, but there are dozens of services it works with. Many of them work with a free account; some require a premium account but at less than £20 a month it’s well worth trying, and you can upgrade and downgrade as and when you need to. Have a look at www.zapier.com
Which tools do you find indisposable in your daily work? I’d love to give them a try. Leave me a comment!
