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.

Are you fed up with:

• Not having a simple way of sharing files with friends & colleagues ?
• Unhelpful email limits on file attachments ? (Yahoo, AOL and GMail all limit you to just 25 MB)
• Waiting around for other file sending services who delay file downloads ?
• Annoying adverts on web pages which host your files for colleagues ?

Well FilePigeon is the answer ! It’s is a really simple way to send large files – no signup is needed (it’s free !), so you can start using it straight away. Uploaded files are hosted on our secure servers and a file download link is sent via email to whoever you want to share your files with. You can also share the link on FaceBook and Twitter.

FilePigeon gives you:

• A free file sharing service without the need to register
• No ads for any users
• Fast uploads & downloads
• Full drag & drop support for all users
• Download files as many times as you want (no restrictions !)
• Send files up to 1GB in size with an account
• Send files securely (over SSL) with a business account
• Oodles of storage and an inbox to manage files with an account

Go try out FilePigeon today ! We’d love to hear what you think.

Happy sending,
The Zamzar (FilePigeon) Team.

We’re really excited about these new conversions – as the number of Mac users continues to grow rapidly more and more people are using iWork to generate and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets, yet not everyone can open them … until now.

You can use Zamzar to upload any Pages (word processing doc), KeyNote (presentation) or Numbers (spreadsheet) and convert them to any one of the following formats:

Pages (.pages) to:

• doc – Microsoft Word Document
• pdf – Portable Document Format
• rtf – Rich Text Format
• txt – Text document

KeyNote (.key) to:

• ppt – Microsoft Powerpoint Presentation

Numbers (.numbers) to:

• csv – Comma Separated Values
• pdf – Portable Document Format
• xls – Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet

iWork is an office suite of desktop applications created by Apple for the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems, and Zamzar supports conversion for all versions of iWork from iWork ’05 right through to the very latest release (currently iWork ’09).

Useful tip: Files created by iWork before the iWork ’09 release are saved into directories. As you cannot upload directories to Zamzar, to convert these files make sure you compress them into a .zip format first so that your directory becomes a .zip file named “someName.pages.zip”, like so:

This is the world’s first support for conversion of iWork files – No other service exists (online or offline) to do this independently from a Mac (even Apple’s iWork.com requires you to own iWork to use it !), and as everything is based in a browser you can peform the conversion on any platform

We’ll be rolling out support for even more “to” formats for Keynote over the coming weeks.

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.

You can view detailed stats on uptime, response time and performance from various countries.

Over time we’d like to add more data to the page – what would you like to see ?

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.

Up until now we’ve been willing to put up with them, as they have provided much needed revenue for the business, and generally speaking if you were determined enough to block them you could.

However, we’ve decided that enough is enough – Ads we’ve seen recently have been obnoxious, distracting, misleading and downright annoying.

We are therefore very pleased to announce that we are removing pop-under ads from Zamzar for all users effective immediately

Say goodbye to this:

Phew !

Happy converting,
The Zamzar Team.

We are therefore pleased to announce that you can now use Zamzar to convert videos from almost any video format into an optimised MP4 format especially designed for the iPad – see below for a list of supported video formats:

• 3g2 – 3GPP2 Multimedia File
• 3gp – 3GPP Multimedia File
• asf – Advanced Streaming Format (Microsoft Corporation)
• avi – Windows video file
• flv – Flash Video
• gvi – Google video file
• m4v – MPEG-4 Video File
• mod – Hard disk camera movie
• mov – Apple QuickTime Movie
• mp4 – MPEG-4 Video File
• mpg – Moving Picture Experts Group File
• rm – RealMedia Streaming Media
• rmvb – RealVideo Variable Bit Rate File
• vob – DVD Video Movie File
• wmv – Windows Media File (Microsoft Corporation)

We hope these conversions will be useful to you lucky iPad owners who want to watch videos directly on your iPad’s.

Happy converting !
The Zamzar Team