Ever had that student that constantly turns in their work done on a program that you don’t have(ahem, Word Perfect)? Or perhaps you needed to do some work for school but the schools computer uses a program that you don’t have at home? Usually, the solution for this involves finding a program to convert it to a format that plays nicely with your computer. Sometimes these programs are free, but often not. Zamzar.com not only does the conversion for free, it does it without ever having to download a thing. How?

Start by going to Zamzar.com, hit the upload button, select the file you want to convert, tell it what you want it to convert it to(Word uses the .doc extension), and then tell it to get to work. After a few minutes you will get an email from them with a link to download the new file. No signing up, no downloading software, very little hassle.

I have tested it out on a basic text document done on Word Perfect and successfully converted it to Word, however I can imagine that some formating issues will arise depending on how complex your document is(pictures, formatting, etc…).

There are a few other reasons you may want to use their service. It not only converts document files, but video and audio too. This could be very handy when you find that killer youtube video that you want to show your students, but are restricted by the schools firewall. They offer the ability to enter Youtube links and convert them to various video types. Handy!

Other useful file conversion utilities? Let us know in the comments.