Ever feel like your project is lost in a sea of emails and missed deadlines? Check out the excerpt from the book “Upgrade to Free: The Best Free and Low-Cost Online Tools and Apps” for an overview of some of the best project management tools, free and paid.
Here’s an easy, fast way to share a file. Just upload a file, and within seconds you have a link to the online version to share with colleagues. Seconds, I tell you. I just uploaded the latest version of the Quick Reference Guide… feel free to download and share!
Ever have to transcribe handwritten notes from a meeting then spend half an hour sending them out to everyone? What a pain.
Minutes.io lets you quickly and easily take live notes of a meeting then distribute them to a group of people with a click of a button.
I love that they don’t make you register for the site even though you have access to the archive.
Oh, and I also love that it’s completely free.
Watch my full review here: YouTube – Minutes.io.
One of my dear friends has cancer and is going through very painful and challenging radiation and chemo. I wanted to raise a little money to help her family, and I discovered ChipIn, a simple little widget that allows you to ask your network to… well… ChipIn!
ChipIn doesn’t charge you anything for the service, but the money is routed through PayPal (you need a free account), and they take out 2.9% plus $.30 per transaction.
ChipIn is great for raising money for friends like Rebecca, but it would also work if you’re asking staffers to pitch in for a Christmas party or the like. It’s important to note that ChipIn donations are not necessarily tax deductible, unless, I guess, they’ve been set up by the charity.
Wanna see how it works? ChipIn a couple of bucks for Rebecca to find out!
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.
I attend a lot of conferences, and inevitably I end up talking to an interesting person who says, “Here, let me give you my card…. oh dear! I seem to have left them in my….”
Contxts solves this problem in an instant. In about 2 minutes, you can set up an account for a virtual business card. Then all you need to do is give your new friend a code to text to 50500, and she instantly has your information. Or you can get her mobile number and send your card to her. It’s easy!
Try it out! Text “AskBethZ” (without the quotations) to 50500!
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…
For the commitment phobic, finding a time to meet with others just doesn’t get any easier. Just visit Doodle.com and click on “Schedule event.” Without having to register or give any personal information, you can quickly set up an event or meeting with alternative times. Then just send the link to members of your team, and each person (again, without registering), can indicate availability.
Here’s a little video about how to set it up:
Doodle’s best features are free, though you can sign up for a premium account with more features for less than $30 a year. Doodle also integrates with lots of other scheduling tools such as Google Calendar and now has an iPhone app.
One of the most popular categories of free and low-cost online tools is online document collaboration. TypeWith.me is one of the easiest, fastest solutions to share documents with colleagues. You simply visit their URL, click to create a new document, and you’re on a new site that you can share right away.
You can upload your own Word, text or HTML document to work on, or you can start with a blank document. When you invite collaborators, each reviewer has his own colors. I like that you can export straight to PDF or keep it in the original format. Another cool feature allows you to watch a quick movie of all the changes that were made and by whom.
TypeWith.me doesn’t require any type of registration, and it’s free, free, free.
NEW! The Cheapskate Freelancer is going multimedia. Watch this 61-second video for more details about TypeWith.me, and favorite the new Cheapskate Freelancer YouTube Channel for more videos (coming soon!):
Because of horrible, malicious virus writers who spend their days trying to figure out clever ways to take over our computers, our bank accounts and the universe, we are warned again and again to never click on anything that we don’t recognize. I used to tell students in my computer courses, “Even if your grandmother sends you a link, be suspicious. Make sure you know where you’re going before you click.”
This is great advice, or it was until a couple of years ago, when Twitter’s 140-character limits meant that we would be 11 characters over just by pasting a link such as http://www.cheapskatefreelancer.com/2010/03/pdfescape-the-pdf-editor-ive-been-dreaming-ofe-online-pdf-reader-editor-form-filler-form-designer-solution/.
With Twitter and other services, brevity was imperative. So they started creating URL shortening services that let you convert a long URL into a teeny, tiny one.
Now back to the security issue. If your grandmother sends you a long link like the one above, you’d probably trust it. But what if the link she sends is http://z.pe/56lG? You may think your grandmother has become a hacker and try to block her.
Some people have an inherent (and justified) fear of shortened URLs since you can’t see what you’re clicking on. But I have good news. A 2010 study by Zscaler Inc., a company that sells security services, looked for malicious content in 1.3 million shortened links taken from Twitter over two weeks. Just 773 of those links – 0.06 percent – were malicious. The rest were just grandmothers and regular users like you and me sharing information and resources with others.
Here are just a few URL shorteners that I use:
(PS — this post is a preview excerpt from the Cheapskate Freelancer book, available in October!)
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