The other day, I had to convert a microsoft word (.doc) format file to adobe acrobat reader (.pdf) file. In ideal world, we should be able to do it easily.. but I had terrible experience. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe provide easy ways to acheive this. I had to download number of software applications (inculding some viruses), also downloaded some driver-plugins for word to print it to pdf. Tried so manythings but nothing seems to work. Some converted the file, but had their ads on it.. I got frustrated and tired with this.. just then I landed on www.zamzar.com.. which was a life saver for me.

As you could guess by now, this website offers a tool to convert files from nearly any format to nearly any format. For example, you could convert a .rm (real media) file to 3gp, 3g3, ac3, aac, avi, flac, flv, gif, iphone, mov, mp3, mp4, mpg, wmv, ogg and wav formats. As you explore their service, it gets more exciting, you could even convert a You Tube video to wmv and store it on your PC! Amazing Idea!!

The best thing is you don't need to install any softwrare. You just upload your file.. zamzar does its job and e-mails you when the conversion is done with a link to the converted file. With this free service, you could conert files upto 100MB size and zamzar holds your converted file for 24 hours. If you need to convert a file over 100 MB or looking for perminant online storage, they provide those services for a fee. By signing up, you could convert files as big as 1 GB and have upto 100GB online storage.

And if you are thinking what all things you can convert.. You could convert documents (html - Hypertext Markup Language, odt - OpenDocument Text Document, pcx - Paintbrush Bitmap Image, pdf - Portable Document Format, png - Portable Network Graphic, ps - Postscript document, txt - Text document mdb - Microsoft Access Database, ods - OpenDocument spreadsheet, rtf - Rich text format, ppt,pptx - Power Point, doc, docx - Word Document, xls,xlsx - Excel Spread Sheet, swf, flv - Macromedia Flash files, etc.), you could convert images (gif - Compuserve graphics interchange, ico - Windows Icon, jpg - JPEG compliant image, pcx - PC Paintbrush Bitmap Graphic, ps - Postscript document, png - Portable Network Graphic, tga - Truevision Targa Graphic, thumbnail - Thumbnail image, tiff - Tagged image file format, wbmp - Wireless Bitmap File Format, etc. ), you can convert  music formats (as mentioned above), video formats (3g2 - 3GPP2 Multimedia File, 3gp - 3GPP Multimedia File, aac - Advanced Audio Coding File, ac3 - AC3 Audio File, avi - Windows video file, flac - Free Lossless Audio Codec, flv - Flash Video, ipod - MPEG-4 Video File, mov - Apple QuickTime Movie, mp3 - Compressed audio file, mp4 - MPEG-4 Video File, mpg - Moving Picture Experts Group File, ogg - Ogg Vorbis Compressed Audio File, wav - Windows audio file, wmv - Windows Media File, etc.), and even the compressed formats (7z - 7-Zip Compressed File, tar.bz2 - Bzip 2 UNIX, Compressed File, cab - Cabinet File, lzh - Compressed Archive File, tar - Tape Archive File, tar.gzh - Gzip Compressed Archive, yz1 - DeepFreezer Compressed Archive, zip - Compressed Archive File).

For a complete list of supported formats, you could visit this link. I used it few times to convert simple files and it worked well for me. If you use this tool, do post your experience here for people to understand zamzar service.

-Rakesh