Adam Wright’s blog

Why is it that these are the only types of stories that makes my town famous on the nets? *facepalm*

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[4:54 PM] Adam Wright: alexandersalamander.com rhymes
[4:54 PM] Adam Wright: CommanderAlexander.com
[4:54 PM] Adam Wright: ooooohhh
[4:54 PM] Adam Wright: u should join the military
[4:54 PM] Charlie Alexander: you were mad at me for using 4 syllables
[4:55 PM] Adam Wright: but this is better
[4:55 PM] Adam Wright: more letters
[4:55 PM] Adam Wright: sexy
[4:55 PM] Adam Wright: u know u wanna start workin your way up the ladder just so a private will salute you one day and say “Commander Alexander, there’s a problem in the poop deck!”

[4:51 PM] Adam Wright: should check if gnarlycharlie’s available
[4:51 PM] Adam Wright: narlycharlie too
[4:51 PM] Charlie Alexander: meh
[4:52 PM] Adam Wright: just saying, u kind of owe it to everyone else to at least check…i mean, how many people have the opportunity to rhyme their name with “narly”?
[4:52 PM] Adam Wright: u owe it to us
[4:52 PM] Adam Wright: hey, i checked “madamimadam.com”
[4:52 PM] Adam Wright: taken
[4:52 PM] Adam Wright: czu i kind of wanted it
[4:53 PM] Adam Wright: it says “im professional”, and “if you’re a hot lady, i’d love to sex you up”

I know I know, ads are the devil.  But I needed to learn how to implement them into a WordPress blog in general and how I would do it.

So I set up my blog’s first Google Adsense ad, which will show up only on the bottom of the latest post.

I got the general idea from this post at DevTopics, and a little code from this post over at OneMansBlog.

My first ad…I should be a millionaire in no time.

Because they didn’t know, until it was too late.

And to all, it was a good night.

Adam’s flickr photostream

“And the lord said, free-eth thy hand and wrist,
and scratcheth thine digits,
and be merry - for tis a Christmas miracle;
thine arm hath be healed!
Be-eth careful though, it still smells of thine cast.
Ewww-eth.” ~Adam 13:37

Recently, a post on the DigitalInspiration blog covered a method that allows easy conversion of several file types including .pdf, .xls, .ppt, .doc, and more to the .html format using only Gmail.  Although I didn’t test drive this method myself, I admit it seems very intriguing and I see myself putting it to good use at one point or another in the near or distant future.  However, using a personal Gmail account while at work isn’t always possible or probable.  So, after a little more time spent “doing the Google,” I came across an article on trusty Lifehacker listing five email addresses that convert documents, and it really sparked my attention.

Now, I’m not a big fan of re-posting articles and posts from other blogs, so I’m not about to go into detail about each of the five file-converting email addresses, so go to the original post by Kevin Purdy to read up on them.  What I do want to point out is a relevant use of at least one of the conversions, so please read on.

Pretty much anyone that deals with .pdf files will attest that they’re no fun when copying data from them into an Excel document.  Sadly, as a pricing/marketing analyst, this task occurs all too often for me.  If you share my feelings for the matter, next time you receive an email with a .pdf attachment that contains data that you need to input into Excel, simply forward the email to “doc@koolwire.com“.  Within a few minutes (took 4 minutes for a 1.5 page .pdf file for me) you’ll receive an email back with a converted .doc file attached.  Obviously .doc files are Microsoft Word files, not Excel, however, upon opening the attached Word file you’ll notice the data that was in the .pdf file has now been inserted into this .doc file neatly in a table, just like in Excel.  So now you can easily copy the data, and paste it into Excel while retaining the table formatting you desire.  W00t!

I give 4 reasons this is extremely useful for me and probably at least somewhat useful for you too:

1. Most importantly and most obviously, it saves you the agonizing time spent copying and pasting each individual cell of data from the .pdf file into the .xls file because you can’t copy an entire table and paste it into Excel without losing its table formatting.
2. Unlike third-party-programs you can download and install on your computer to do this, you receive the results in an email when they’re done, as if someone else is doing it for you and sending it back once finished.  This is extremely useful because the conversion isn’t happening on your PC so its not taking extra system resources, and …
3. …because the end results aren’t stored in some “PDF files converted to Excel” folder that you’ll need to refer to when looking for the results.  Instead, the results are right in your inbox along with your other projects and todos.
4. Lastly, besides your little part of forwarding the email with the attached .pdf file, the entire process is automated.  Which means there’s no fussing with settings in that third-party-program or even clicking the start button, you just [with a little corny and overused plagiarism modified to fit this example] “send it and forget it”.  Then you go about your business working on another task until you receive the conversion results email back, at which point you get to it at your leisure.  So there’s no pop-up windows notifying you of conversion completion, or program windows to close now that the process is complete, just the results in an email in your inbox.

So give this method a test run if you have a .pdf file with a ton of data in it that normally takes you a long time to get into Excel.  Hopefully it works out well for you. ^_^