We’re excited to announce that you can now use Zamzar to convert PDF files into Excel (XLS) files – all online and all for free.

We hope this will be especially useful for all of you who have to deal with data locked away in PDF files that needs to be manipulated or analysed in a spreadsheet.

You might, for example want to use Zamzar to convert Apple’s latest set of financial figures into an Excel file:

.. or your local train timetable:

Don’t forget that you can use Zamzar’s URL feature to grab a pdf file directly from another site on the web and convert it into xls. Just head on over to Zamzar to get converting !

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team

The Guardian has just announced their list of the Top 100 websites for 2009 and we’re honoured that Zamzar has been recognised in the “Create/collaborate” section.

Zamzar is one of only 2 sites in that section which remain from the Guardian’s 2008 list (the other being NetVibes).

We’ve worked hard this year to improve the site with dozens of new conversion types (including CAD, Visio and MS Project) and the ability to convert documents into speech.

We’re excited about what 2010 has in store, but we wouldn’t be anywhere without you.

So a big thanks to all of you who use the service, tell your friends and colleagues about it and keep us busy with suggestions on how to improve it

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

The good folks at TechCrunch have just announced that voting has opened for the 2009 “Crunchie” awards which recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

If you’ve had fun using Zamzar then why not nominate us for the best international startup award ? Nominations close at midnight PST December 4, 2009.

You can read more about the 2009 Crunchies here.

Happy voting !
The Zamzar Team.

First of all, a big thanks to all of you who took the time out to enter the Zamzar third birthday competition.

We had a great time reading all of your entries, and a hard time selecting our favourites, but here are the three winners.

chadkafka:

iiamcrystal:

ElricKeyblade:

We’ve contacted all 3 on Twitter to arrange your Pro accounts.

The honorable mention award goes to jonguntrip for his humorous yet cheeky message. Better luck next time Jon …

Sorry to those of you that didn’t win – We’ll look at running more competitions in future, so stay tuned to the blog, Twitter and our Facebook Fan page for future announcements.

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

Mazel Tov ! Zamzar is celebrating its third birthday today

We’ve come from humble beginnings – here is what the very first edition of the service looked like:

We’ve come a long way since then, and now handle tens of thousands of conversions every day. We wanted to say a big THANK YOU to you guys – all the people who use our services, and to celebrate …

We’re giving away 3 professional accounts to the Zamzar service for 1 year !

To enter the competition to win a pro account just send out a tweet on Twitter to complete the following sentence: “I ♥ http://www.zamzar.com because …”

Go for something funny / original / amusing and we’ll pick our 3 favourite tweets and list the winners here on the blog early next week.

Happy Tweeting !
The Zamzar Team.

Zamzar now supports the ability to convert Microsoft Project files into a variety of different formats. MS Project is a popular project management application introduced by Microsoft way back in 1984 to, er closely track and monitor people and projects. Sound familiar ?

Whilst MS Project has proved useful for various project managementy-tasks such as tracking progress, managing budgets and analyzing workloads it uses a proprietary .mpp file format to save project management files to. This can make it difficult to share files with co-workers who don’t happen to have MS Project installed themselves. We’ve fixed this problem by allowing you convert these files into PDF or any of the following image formats:

• bmp – Windows bitmap
• gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
• jpg – JPEG compliant image
• pdf – Portable Document Format
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• tiff – Tagged image file format
• xls – Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

So for you all the project managers out there we hope this gives you an easy way of sharing project plans with colleagues without asking them to first perform a mammoth install of Microsoft Project !

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team

We’re broadening our support for Microsoft Office formats, and you can now use Zamzar to convert any of the following formats into Microsoft’s .xlsx format – an increasingly popular spreadsheet format introduced in MS Office 2007:

• csv – Comma Separated Values
• ods – OpenDocument spreadsheet
• wks – Microsoft Works Spreadsheet
• xls – Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

We hope this conversion will be useful to those of you who receive documents in these formats from colleagues and friends who need them returned in the .xlsx format.

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team

You can now use Zamzar to convert MS Word documents (.doc files) into a variety of different image formats, including jpg, gif and png. This conversion is really useful for situations when you might want to embed graphics or thumbnails of Word documents into a website, or to share the contents of a document with a client in a format that can’t be edited by them.

You can now convert MS Word documents into any of the following formats:

• bmp – Windows bitmap
• gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
• jpg – JPEG compliant image
• pcx – PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• ps – Postscript document
• thumbnail – Thumbnail image
• tiff – Tagged image file format

MS Word doesn’t allow you to save into any of these image formats, so to convert your Word docs, just head on over to Zamzar.

Happy Converting !
The Zamzar Team.

You can now use Zamzar to convert a variety of image files into the ever-popular PDF format.

Converting images into PDF can be useful when you need to share designs or graphics with clients in a standard and professional format which they are likely to be able to view. Adobe Acrobat has a huge installed base, and converting to PDF is a nice way of adding a professional touch to your design.

You can now convert any of the following formats into PDF:

• bmp – Windows bitmap
• gif – Compuserve graphics interchange
• ico – Windows Icon
• jpg – JPEG compliant image
• pcx – PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic
• png – Portable Network Graphic
• ps – Postscript document
• tga – Truevision Targa Graphic
• thumbnail – Thumbnail image
• tiff – Tagged image file format
• wbmp – Wireless Bitmap File Format

Just head over to Zamzar to convert.

Happy Converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We’ve just added the ability to convert EPS files to PDF using Zamzar, online and for free.

As we mentioned on Tuesday when we announced the ability to convert EPS to other image formats, Encapsulated PostScript is a popular a graphics file format, designed around the PostScript specification, often used for vector and bitmap graphics artwork.

However PDF is becoming increasingly popular as a replacement for the EPS format, mainly due to its versatility as a delivery format for sending complete publications to press, for soft-proofing, distribution on the Internet, and file archiving.

Just head on over to Zamzar to convert your EPS files today !

Happy converting !
The Zamzar Team