Tuesday Tech Tidbit

Online OCR is a brilliant online tool that recognizes text in images or PDFs.  In seconds it converts the text into a word processor document that allows you to edit and format the text.  Magic!  If you've ever had a PDF or a hard copy of a document that you wanted to edit, Online OCR is your new best friend.   OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.   Online OCR allows you to upload an image file or a PDF.  You then decide what kind of output file you want to generate.  Typically one would choose Microsoft Word.  Even if you don't have Microsoft Word on your machine, you can easily upload a Word file to Google Drive, which converts it to an editable Google Doc.   Online OCR even works with other languages.  If you are uploading an image or PDF that contains a foreign language, you can instruct it to maintain that language when converting to text.  (In the video below, I misinterpreted the language feature and...

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a one-stop shop for converting files and editing PDFs?  Meet your new best friend, 123apps !  This website offers a bunch of free, web-based applications that allow you to edit a variety of media files as well as convert files from one format to another.  The interface is super easy, yet this resource is quite powerful. The biggest draw to 123apps in my opinion is its massive array of PDF editing functions .  You can split, merge, compress, and rotate PDFs.  If you have a couple of PDFs that you want to merge together, or if you want to snag a couple of pages from a giant PDF document, look no further than 123apps.  While you're at it, you can convert a wide variety of file types into PDF, or you can convert a PDF into an image file. 123apps also offers a wide range of video and audio editing tools. You can: Trim video Merge videos Add audio to video Rotate video Flip video Change video speed 123apps has a voice recorder as ...