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documents

Watermark it

Digital watermarks can help secure critical documents, whether they're business documents, creative property, or personal records. A-PDF Watermark adds digital watermarks to PDF files, singly or in batches. Watermarks can be logos, text, a date/time stamp, page number, image, and more. The program can also label the file's status, stamp files, and enable watermark manipulation within PDFs. It can even import and export watermarks and print without saving, two enterprise-class features.

A-PDF Watermark's interface is typical of recent Windows apps, a clean, efficient, familiar setup that, together with PDF-based Help file and demos, makes this program … Read more

Basic watermarker

The Internet is a bit of a free-for-all in terms digital media; most people have no qualms about saving--and using--other people's images without permission. This can be prevented to some extent with the use of watermarks. Image Watermarks is a basic program that allows users to apply watermarks to batches of images, discouraging their appropriation by unscrupulous Internet users.

The program's interface is simple and not particularly attractive, but it's easy enough to figure out. Users simply select the image or folder of images that they want to use, design their watermark (or load a previously designed … Read more

Quickoffice, Docs To Go taking productivity tussle to the iPad

Quickoffice and Documents To Go have long been in lock-step as the productivity apps to beat on the iPhone. As soon as the feature set of one pulls ahead, the other is sure to leapfrog its way ahead--for a while, anyway.

A few hours after Data Viz updated its Documents To Go app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, Quickoffice told us its intention to submit a version of its mobile suite for iPad to Apple in the next couple of weeks.

Documents To Go Premium 3.3 adapts to the iPad's extra-large, high-resolution screen and adds a … Read more

Word searcher

DataMystic's WordPipe is an enterprise-class search-and-replace utility for Microsoft Word documents. With it, you can search for and replace text, hyperlinks, contacts, drop-down fields, bookmarks, document properties, and more, in thousands of documents at once. It updates UNC paths when servers are renamed and automatically handles passwords and read-only files, too.

WordPipe's Evaluation version opens with a countdown nag screen. The program's main interface is a businesslike dialog with a few simple file menus, including a Help file, and basic control icons above a tabbed display. Add and Delete buttons below the main window make it easy … Read more

Outlook add-in

Microsoft's Outlook does so much that few users need more, but there's always room for improvement, especially when it comes to productivity enhancements. Software Solutions' Aladdins Office Documents Pro is an Outlook add-in that makes it easy to create specialized Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and customized, predefined Outlook emails that save time and increase accuracy over individually prepared Office documents.

Office Documents is an Outlook add-in, so its "main interface" is two small buttons the program adds to the Outlook toolbar, one for the main menu and another for the Aladdins Contacts List. Right-clicking the main … Read more

$9,000 is the new 'free' for Oracle

The open-source world has long debated alternatives to the word "free" to describe open-source software. It's "free as in freedom," they declare, "not free as in free beer."

For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, however, the answer is much simpler--"free as in $9,000."

As noted by The H, Oracle still touts its Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office as a free download. But clicking through reveals that Oracle has changed its license terms for the formerly free plug-in, which enables Office users to read, edit, and save to … Read more

Juicing your files

If you're a graphic designer or you otherwise work a lot with images, File Juicer can be an extremely useful (if narrow in purpose) utility. Like a kitchen juicer extracts juice from fruits and vegetables, this application "juices" a wide variety of image formats and even audio and video out of almost any kind of file, from browser caches to Microsoft Office docs--so for example, you can drop a PowerPoint onto File Juicer, and the app will extract any images, text, and even Flash and ZIP files from the presentation.

File Juicer excels at its core purpose, … Read more

Help help

HLP to RTF Converter by Armenian Dictionary Software is an interesting utility that can convert any Windows Help file (HLP) to a printable, high-quality RTF document or generate completely recompilable Help projects. You can use it to print out manuals for employees or for safekeeping, as well as create your own WinHelp project, rescue previously complied files for conversion or re-use, or simplify the generation and handling of HLP-formatted documentation from a standard authoring format.

This program's tabbed, dialog-based interface is practically self explanatory, reflecting its focused mission. Tabs let you select Batch or Single mode; there's the … Read more

Keyword creator

Back in the 1990s, the keywords meta element was an important part of Web design; putting the right keywords in this tag helped search engines properly index sites and, if done right, helped improve search rankings. Unfortunately, because it was so easy for unscrupulous site owners to add misleading keywords and create irrelevant search results, meta keywords have largely fallen out of favor with the major search engines. If you decide to use them anyway, Keywords Meta Tag Generator can help you analyze your content and select the best keywords for each particular page.

The program's interface is basic, … Read more

Office applications: Still your father's Oldsmobile

It's 2010. The Internet is pervasive and mobile. Business processes, supply chains, and financial markets are globally connected and electronically executed. There are no flying cars, but in many other ways, the future has arrived. Yet when we look at the tools and processes organizations use to create and update documents--the lifeblood for business processes--they're straight out of the 1990s playbook. The world's changed, but the office applications most in use today--our word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs--basically have the same priorities and follow the same strategies they did two decades ago.

Sure, today's office apps … Read more