Your Nerdy Best Friend

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.

I’ve written before about Microsoft Office Accounting Express, which is an awesome free accounting tool (and a Beth Favorite) that works like QuickBooks, at least for amateurs like me.

Someone sent me a link to FastDue, which is intriguing as well. It’s got the same kind of invoicing capabilities and also lets you accept PayPal. But the coolest thing is that it contains a library of business document templates, such as contracts, non-disclosure agreements, etc. People are always asking me where to get agreements, and I like that they’re right here in the system.

FastDue is free for now — they pay for themselves with ads. I read they may switch to a standard/premium structure, which I would guess means you may be able to choose not to have the ads.

FastDue.com – Move Your Business Online.

FormSpring is a handy service that allows you to build online forms. You can either host it on your site or let FormSpring host it (for free).

It’s great for contact forms, event registrations, feedback, job applications, surveys and sign-up forms for newsletters. With the free version, you can create 3 forms with up to 15 fields each. The next level starts at $9 a month for 5 forms with 30 fields.

Super cool … nonprofits get a 10% discount.

Web Form Builder – FormSpring.