Zamzar

The Problem (Microsoft)

We often receive emails requesting support for a new conversion type or help with problems converting a tricky file – we read every one, and try our best to help where we can, but it’s not every day that the inventor of one of those file formats emails us …

Two weeks ago we received an email from Robert Gaskins. Robert is widely credited as having been part of the team which invented PowerPoint back in the mid 1980s. He lead the team at Forethought Inc that received venture capital investment from Apple Computing and which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft who now own the product that is installed on over 1 billion computers worldwide and is a standard for presentations from Tibet to Timbuktu.

Robert suggested there were a large number of people (himself included), who had older Powerpoint presentations that wouldn’t open in the newer versions of Microsoft Office (2007 and 2010), instead receiving the following error:

Microsoft Madness

This problem seems to be caused by 2 acts of Microsoft madness:

1. In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft deliberately disabled support for many older file formats and provided 2 mind-boggling complex workarounds(here and here).
2. Perhaps even more annoyingly for users, Microsoft doesn’t support opening older (’95 and ’97) versions of Powerpoint files in Office 2007 and 2010.

The Solution (Zamzar)

Robert asked if there was anything we could do to help, and we’ve worked hard to come up with a solution – We’re pleased to announce that from today if you have a Microsoft Powerpoint file older than 1997 that doesn’t open in Microsoft Powerpoint 2007 or Microsoft Powerpoint 2010 you can now use Zamzar to convert it into a 1997-2003 version of Powerpoint which makes it compatible with the latest 2007 and 2010 versions of Powerpoint.

You can convert files from such ancient versions of PowerPoint as v3.0 – released 20 years ago in 1992 !

Just select “ppt (1997-2003)” as the “to” format in Step 2 of your conversion on Zamzar:

Thanks to Robert for bringing this to our attention – we hope this helps. If anyone else has any new suggestions for help with your file format problems do get in touch !

Happy Presenting !
The Zamzar Team

If you signup, you can now download converted files from Zamzar up to 5 times quicker than previously. This applies to any newly converted file, and also any file you have already converted.

If you’re still a free Zamzar user, what are you waiting for ? Sign up today to experience this high-speed goodness !

What do you get ?

Benefits for our subscribers include:

• Super fast downloads – We use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to give you high speed downloads
• More reliable downloads – No more annoying “download interrupted” messages
• Better safety for your data – Files are now backed up across multiple devices in multiple secure datacenters

Fast. Very Fast.

If we applied this speed increase to other areas of human endeavour:

• Running the 100 metres would take 1.9 seconds
• You could travel to the moon in half a day (Apollo 11 took 3 days 4hours)
• Formula One cars would travel at over 1000 miles per hour

If you’re already a Zamzar subscriber why not go convert a file now to try it out, or if you want to dig deeper read on to understand all the geeky details of how we did this …

The Geeky Details

Still with us ? Ok, so to achieve this speed increase our engineers have taken advantage of some technical wizardry from the folks at Amazon.com.

All converted files from Zamzar account holders are now stored in a highly secure Content Delivery Network provided by Amazon – This network (known as CloudFront) employs a network of edge locations that cache copies of files closer to wherever you guys are on the internet.

CloudFront then ensures that any download requests for those files are served by the closest edge location. As a result, requests travel shorter distances which means that file downloads get delivered to you far more quickly.

This means that if you happen to be located in a picturesque city such as Frankfurt instead of your computer having to send requests across the Atlantic to download a file from Zamzar:

… you now automatically get the file from a server nearby:

CloudFront has effectively given Zamzar edge locations all over the globe, from San Jose to Singapore, so no matter where you are you should see a significant boost in performance:

We hope you enjoy these improvements, all of which are available immediately.

Happy Converting (and downloading !)
The Zamzar Team.

Harry was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour at the age of 7. Sadly he died when he was 11, but not before he had raised £500,000 through his “Help Harry Help Others” campaign as part of his wish to rid the world of brain tumours. Zamzar is proud to support his campaign, having donated financially and helped to raise awareness of the cause, and we hope that some of you may wish to get involved too.

A group of 7 men and women are aiming to run all 430 miles of the London Underground in their pyjama bottoms to raise money and awareness for Harry’s campaign. They are running 25 half marathons every week and 4 marathons over the course of 6 months. So far they have raised over £7,000 but they are keen to raise more, and have issued an invitation for you to join them, wherever you are in the world !

International Tube Run for Harry Moseley

On Saturday March 10th Harry’s Tube Runners are organising the International Tube Run for Harry Moseley.

If you live within close proximity to a tube, subway or tram and can walk or run just one mile then they woud love for you to get involved.

Why not invite friends and family to join you, get your pyjama bottoms on, get sponsored and head down to your local tube / subway / tram stop and walk or run a mile ?

So far there are runners signed up from London, Delhi, Auckland, New York, Madrid, Sydney, Hong Kong, Chennai, Barcelona and Bangalore. The Zamzar staff will be getting their own PJ bottoms on and running part of the London Underground for the cause !

For more information visit the tube runner blog, drop them an email with photos of your efforts, or visit the donation page. We hope you can join us on 10th March in raising money and awareness for this incredible charity.

Instead of using the Zamzar website to convert files you can send files from your email account to:

    format @zamzar.com
    (e.g. pdf@zamzar.com, gif@zamzar.com etc)

… we’ll convert them in lightning quick speed and email back a link to your converted file.

So what’s the beef ?

Let’s look at what you can do:

1. Email any file which is a supported “from” format on our conversion types page to the format you want it converted to – For example to convert a PDF into a Word Doc (.doc file) email your PDF file to doc@zamzar.com
2. Forward email which has been sent by friends and colleagues to the email address of the format you want it converted to.
3. Send multiple files in the same email message for conversion (as many as you want if they are within the size limits)
4. Convert an email attachment into multiple different formats, by specifying multiple “to” addresses (e.g. jpg@zamzar.com, gif@zamzar.com).
5. Convert files sent to your iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry directly from your mobile device using email.
6. Convert videos into a format you can watch directly on your iPad or iPhone using our new streaming support.

You can read more about the details of this new service on our FAQ page.

Any limits ?

Most email clients only allow you to send attachments up to 25 MB in size, so limits for the size of file you can email us to convert are less than on the main Zamzar site. At the time of launch they are as follows (per file, not per message):

    Free Service – up to 1 MB
    Basic Plan – up to 5 MB
    Pro Plan – up to 15 MB
    Business Plan – up to 25 MB

Email and the dinosaurs

Email is old, maybe as old as the dinosaurs.

Even though many of us have a love / hate relationship with email, we all use it to stay connected. Here are some interesting statistics:

1. If email was a country, its 1.4 billion users would make it the largest in the world. Bigger than China, bigger than the USA and EU combined.
2. 247 billion emails are sent each day, or one every 0.00000035 seconds.
3. In the time it takes you to read this sentence, some 20 million emails entered cyberspace.

Even if you send us just one email we’d be delighted. We’d also scan it for attachments and convert them.

We hope you like the new service

Happy email converting !
The Zamzar Team.

So if you get stuck in a hole with an odd format you need to view whilst you’re out and about you can just “Zamzar it” into a format which you can stream immediately.

We even offer optimised output formats for different devices – just select “iPhone”, “iPad” or “iPod” as the to format for your conversion and if it’s a video file we’ll make sure it looks great on screen for you:

Why not check it out ? Maybe you want to listen to a famous Winston Churchill speech or view a trailer about a rabbit with attitude.

As more people switch to using mobile devices to view and interact with their files we hope this is a useful addition to your toolkit.

We also have more exciting mobile announcements just around the corner – stay tuned !

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We decided to put together a step by step guide to take you through the process – we’ll even tell you how you can grab a video from YouTube and use that in your presentations (without the need for an internet connection when presenting !)

Selecting the Video – From your computer

If you want to use a video which is already on your computer then follow the steps below. If you want to use a YouTube video instead just skip to the next section:

(1) Open up your web browser and go to to http://www.zamzar.com.

(2) Click the “Browse” button and find the video file you want to use within Powerpoint and select it.

Selecting the Video – From YouTube

To use a video from YouTube in your presentation just:

(1) Open up your web browser and go to http://www.zamzar.com/url.

(2) Enter the link to the YouTube video in the first box on the page.

Preparing the Video

Now that we have selected a video to use, the next step is to get that video into a format which Powerpoint can use. To do this:

(3) On the Zamzar website select a format to convert the video into from the dropdown list in “Step 2″ of the site. Select one of the 3 following formats to ensure you get a video which can then be imported into PowerPoint (they each have different benefits):

• AVI – Highest quality video, biggest file size
• MPG – Lower quality video, smaller file size
• WMV – Medium to high quality video, file size in between AVI and MPG

(5) Enter the email address where Zamzar should send the link to your converted file to.

(6) Click the “Convert” button – check all the details you entered look right then click “OK”.

(7) Hey Presto ! Within minutes the link to your converted file will appear in your email inbox – just click this link.

(8) Clicking the link in the email will take you to a page on Zamzar where you can grab your converted video file – Click the “Download Now” button and your download will start – save this to a location on your computer where you know you will find it again !

Embedding the Video

Once you have the video in a useable format the next step is to put it into your presentation:

(9) Open up your presentation in Microsoft Powerpoint (or start a new one), then follow the instructions below for the version you have:

Office 2003 – Navigate to the menu option “Insert” then Select “Movies and Sound” then “Movie from File”

Office 2007 – Navigate to the menu option “Insert” then Select “Movie” then “Movie from File”

Office 2010 – Navigate to the menu option “Insert” then Select “Video” then “Video from File”

(10) When prompted, choose whether you want PowerPoint to play the movie automatically withint your presentation or whether you would prefer to click on the image of the Movie to make it play when presenting.

You’re Done !

We’ve shown you how you can take a video file from your computer or on YouTube and embed it into your PowerPoint presentation using Zamzar.

We hope you’ve found the tutorial helpful – why not share it with friends or tell us in the comments what other tutorials you might find helpful ?

Happy Presenting !
The Zamzar Team

The Button

The Zamzar Web Browser Button has been around for a few years now, and is the best way of converting your files at the touch of a button from within your web browser. If you don’t have it already stop everything and get it here now !.

The Problem

Recently some of you who use the button reported it isn’t working in the Google Chrome web browser when trying to convert YouTube videos.

We’ve taken a look into this problem and there is a bug in Chrome which is causing this to break. If you want the juicy technical details you can see them here, but in layman’s terms we can tell you:

    “Google broke it”.

How to fix it

Fortunately there is a simple way to fix the problem … unfortunately it’s something you need to do rather than us.

Step 1 – Open a new tab in Chrome and click “Apps” at the bottom of the browser

Step 2 – Right click the YouTube app and select “Remove from Chrome”

Step 3 – Click uninstall

Step 4 – Restart the web browser

Step 5 (optional) – Sing joyfully

Hopefully this will help if you come up against the problem whilst we wait for Google to pull their fingers out and fix things in Chrome

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

Here’s a quick rundown of the things we’ve been fixing in recent months.

If you’ve noticed any other bugs, or want us to improve anything else with the service please let us know.

Conversions

• PDF to JPG – In some cases we noticed that very large files (500+ pages) were failing to convert.
• Keynote to PPT – Some Apple Keynote presentations had issues when being converted into Microsoft Powerpoint.
• DOCX to DOC – Some larger .docx files were failing to convert correctly to the .doc format.
  Note: We’re still aware of an issue whereby some files with a non-Latin alphabet fail to convert. Our engineers are working to fix this.
• PDF to XLS – A bug in our conversion process caused a number of these conversions to fail. We’ve now fixed this to improve conversion success for these files by over 40%
• PUB to PDF – Files with very long filenames were failing, an issue which we’ve now fixed.

Video conversions

We fixed an issue which had been preventing video file conversions from the popular video sharing website at GodTube. Yay !

Notification Emails

• Delivering to your inbox – We’ve improved the way we send email notifications for conversions so that less of them end up in your spam folders.
• Look & Feel – In some email providers (most notably Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail) Zamzar conversion emails looked wonky. We’ve now tidied them up to look all nice and shiny.

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We thought it would be helpful to start providing more detailed information about the various file formats that Zamzar supports for conversion to help give you a better idea of how you can use them, and in what programs they are supported.

So from today we’ll be hotlinking to individual file format information pages on our conversion types page as well as providing a dedicated file formats information page. Links will go through to dedicated pages giving background information on the file format, what programs support it and useful links for it. They will look like the one below:

We’d love feedback from you on what information would be useful for you on these pages, and on any improvements you’d like to see so that we can make them even better. Please let us know in the comments below, on Twitter or Facebook !

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.

Just two months ago we launched support for converting Keynote files into Powerpoint’s PPT format. As we promised back then we are now launching support for even more formats. You can now convert Keynote files to:

• html – Hypertext Markup Language
• ipod – MPEG-4 Video File
• jpg – JPEG compliant image
• mov – Apple QuickTime Movie
• pdf – Portable Document Format
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• tiff – Tagged image file format

We think these new formats offer a great opportunity for sharing presentations created with Keynote more widely – the various image formats enable you to share individual slides with friends, whilst HTML is a great format for getting your slide deck online quickly and easily.

Don’t take our word for it – Go try it out for yourself today !

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.