Tip #5: Screen capture pictures and Video Screen Captures with ease!

Ever wanted to capture a screen shot of something you were working on but didn't know how?

Well if you are on a Windows PC, you can always push the "PrtScn" (aka Print Screen) button and then paste the output into a picture friendly wordprocessor like Microsoft Word or a photo editor and then save your picture there, but what about making it available on the web real easily? Well my buddy and coworker Ryan McReynolds showed me a great program called"Jing" by Techsmith. Just download it and get started pretty quickly. It will even upload anything you want to share with the click of a button and give you a link to share it publicly. Of course you can also save it to your harddrive or share it via facebook or twitter.

I've attached a video on how to do a screen video capture as well at the bottom! Happy Sharing!

Screen Capture with Jing

To see a screen capture video i made, just go here.

Screen Capture Video

Tip #4: How to edit PDFs and other graphics files for free using "Inkscape"

So I was recently frustrated that I couldn't open a special Adobe Illustrator (".ai") file that some students from last summer's Boston Ops project put together for my team at my job working with college students. I did a quick google search and found Inkscape , which appears to be a VERY useful tool for editing not only PDFs, but other graphics files as well:

Only issue I've found with this program is when dealing with multiple pages. The SVG native format that this program uses (until you save it to your desired format in the list of options above) isnt' yet designed for this and so you may have to combine the pages into one PDF. But hey, it's easy, so Happy editing for FREE!

Tip #3: How to combine multiple PDF documents into one!

Ever had a few different PDFs that you wanted to bring together into one?

In order to do this using my instructions, you must

1) have Windows on your computer

2) know how to install a program

3) know where to find the PDFs you want to combine on your computer.

Well all you have to do is go and download and install a helpful tool called "PDFCreator" by clicking on the green button at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ and install it on your computer. It seems to only be available for Windows at this time. =( then follow the directions below and Voila! you have your PDF documents combined into one!

In PDFCreator:

1. Open the documents you wish to combine.

2. Print the first document as you would on a standard printer.

3. When the print dialog appears, change the printer from your default printer to the PDFCreator printer. If the PDFCreator printer is your default printer, you do not have to change it. Then click OK.

4. Another window may appear asking you to fill in some information to create your PDF. The PDFCreator print monitor comes up and the document is in the queue.

5. Go to the second document and print it using the PDFCreator printer as you did for the first document. Repeat for each of the PDFs you want to combine.

6. The PDFCreator print monitor now shows both documents you wish to combine in the queue. Document menu and click on Combine All. The two documents will become one. This may take a little time, but you know you are finished when there is only one document shown in the queue.

7. Now click on the Documents menu and click Print. PDFCreator will ask for some information and where you want to save it or email it. I click on Save since I use Gmail to send documents. Then save the new merged PDF file wherever you like and you are Finished!

8. Your PDF will be created and opened up in your default PDF viewer for you to see. NOTE: if you print documents of different sizes, you may find the page size needs to be adjusted for your printer.