Your Nerdy Best Friend

My experience as a copywriter revealed to me the secret insecurities that many people have about their writing. Incredibly intelligent people with excellent communication skills would cringe when they handed me a first draft of a piece they wanted me to shape.

With visions of former English teachers in their heads, they fretted about grammar, spelling and word choice, forever concerned that they were making the mistakes that they made when they were in school.

Most of the time, they had nothing to worry about, but a clever, anonymous tool can help restore a writer’s confidence, no matter his level.

Just paste text into a text box at www.PaperRater.com and receive instant feedback about spelling, grammar, word choice and more. It’ll even analyze your sentence structure and vocabulary use to give you an overall grade, just like your English teacher used to give.

Designed to help students improve their writing, this tool is completely free and a little addictive. I ran several of my published pieces through the analysis and was surprised by the little errors I had missed.

Oh, and I ran this post through PaperRater — I earned a “B.” Harumph. Paper Rater Blog Analysis.

Paper Rater: Free Online Grammar Checker, Proofreader and More.

It’s no secret that many, many awesome people have found themselves dusting off their resumes and setting off on a job hunt during this challenging economic period. I ran across JobSpice, an easy, fast way to import your LinkedIn profile into their fields and create a basic, downloadable resume within minutes. You need to watch my 2-minute video to see how easy it is!

Get the book! Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Online Tools and Apps is just ten bucks on Amazon.com!

An Ask Beth Z follower wrote in this morning with a quick question:

We are looking for a free program like Print Shop.
You know, the old program that would let you make cards, posters, fliers, etc…
Please Help! Thanks, Susan

Happy to help, Susan. Here’s a quick video review of PagePlus, a free alternative to Microsoft Publisher and Print Shop. These types of low-cost desktop publishing tools are great for producing quick brochures, office signs, business cards, etc. Have your own question for Your Nerdy Best Friend? Ask it now!

Credit card machines for small businesses can be expensive and a hassle, and often you have to enter into a contract with a company for the equipment and the service. But if you’re a small business like me, a super-easy credit card reader like Square may be just the ticket.

Square is a tiny little card reader that slips into the audio port of your Android phone, iPhone or iPad. You set up a free account, get a free reader and can start swiping cards immediately. The system is linked to your bank account, and the money transfers in the next day. They charge no setup or maintenance fees, and take just 2.75% out of every transaction. They’ll even help you calculate and keep track of sales tax.

I’ve been practicing with the reader by charging the price of my book on my husband’s credit card. He doesn’t know it yet, but he is going to have plenty of copies to give away for Christmas.

Watch my full review here:

My husband and I often lose our battle to keep the dining room table clean because of the dozens and dozens of business cards that pile up. We know we need to put them somewhere, but they have no real home and they end up cluttering up our living areas.

Sure, you can buy an iPhone app that scans the card, but you have to double check everything, and it ends up being a pain. And there are several card-scanning businesses out there that will input your business cards, but it’ll cost you $10 and up a month.

But the other day I discovered an amazing free tool that will bring order back to our home. Like other iPhone card management apps, CardMunch lets you take a picture of the card. But the difference is that the picture is transmitted to an actual person who checks the data and sends accurate contact information back to your phone.

It’s free thanks to LinkedIn, who bought the service and did away with the pricing. Thus, it has a one-button system to allow you to request a LinkedIn connection, plus other features let you send emails, download your entire contact list and integrate your contacts with your iPhone address book.

CardMunch

If you don’t own Adobe Acrobat (standard full version starts at $299), working with PDFs can be painful. I’ve written before about PDFescape, my all-time favorite PDF tool, which allows you to add comments to PDFs, actually fill out forms (even if forms aren’t enabled) and lets you do some modest editing.

With Adobe Reader’s new release, you can now add comments and share PDFs much easier (thank goodness!), so you might not need PDFescape as much as you used to, but they’ve included more features that I love.

Here’s a quick overview of PDFescape…

Oh, I’m thrilled! I just found a PDF tool that allows you to add text, notes, form fields and more to existing PDFs. I’m often frustrated when my clients send me PDFs to edit because I have to do screenshots with Jing page by page. Don’t get me wrong — I adore Jing, but the process takes forever.

But PDFescape lets you upload a PDF and add all the notes you need without having to have Adobe Acrobat, which costs hundreds of dollars.

This find is definitely my favorite of 2010.

PDFescape – Free PDF Editor & PDF Form Filler – Your Free Online PDF Reader, Editor, Form Filler, Form Designer, Solution.

Oh, I love free stuff, and I love people who make it easier to download free stuff.

Visit the Ninite site, and check off the free applications you want on your computer, such as Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, Audacity, Skype, AVG, Adobe Reader, Gimp… The list is fantastic! (And it reminds me of all the great tools I still need to cover here on Cheapskate Freelancer.)

Once you choose your programs, click to install, and Ninite will manage your installation. This is great when you are doing a full upgrade to Windows 7.

Ninite Easy PC Setup and Multiple App Installer – Great For Win7 Upgrades.

Freelancers and small businesses from all around the world are waiting to help you on Elance. All you need to do to hire a pro is to create a project and put it out for bids. You can find providers who meet your needs and invite them specifically to bid on your projects, or you can wait and see who finds you.

The cool thing about Elance (besides the very affordable prices you can find) is that you don’t release payment until you’re satisfied, so you can guard against a flighty freelancer.

Elance | Hire experts to do your work: outsource to companies, consultants and freelance professionals..

No list of free and low-cost tools is complete without mentioning Gimp. Gimp is like a free version of Adobe Photoshop, complete with the whole gamut of tools I can’t figure out how to use.

It’s downloadable and works in a whole bunch of platforms. I just read they now have a cool animation package as well. Again — all free.

GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Although I appreciate the coolness of Gimp, it’s really too advanced for my meager photo editing needs. Instead, I rely on Picnik.