I did not intend my post about docx conversions to really be a sarcastic discussion on the virtuous Microsoft corporation, rather I was just pointing out a trick I learned when I needed some quick off-hours help. A very positive comment was about the value of ZamZar in doing the conversion I needed. I tried it out last night, and while the results were a correctly converted Powerpoint document — the results took most of the night to get to me. I’m not complaining… it’s a free service and they even indicate that it can take up to an hour. I was pleased

The inspiration though is not the link to Zamzar. The inspiration is in the comment that if you just changed the extension from docx to doc that file would just work. I took the comment as either incredibly dumb or wickedly sarcastic, I’m not sure what the true basis was. However, here is the inspiration.

What if a brilliant software company were to come up with an application that sat in the tray that listened for extension changes and responded far more intuitively than Windows “if you change the extension the file may become unusable ” message. What if this software noticed that I changed .docx to .doc, and recognizing that this was a “reasonable” conversion and popped up a message saying “Hey… that’s a valid conversion… do you want me to make this file conversion for you? Oh and while I am at it, do you want to to overwrite your existing file or just save this as a new file?”

That to me seems like a very valid, awesome, and as someone who has to send clients files all the time — very useful tool. I have no idea whether something like this exists. If it does, awesome. If not, I can see a simple set of file conversions that just make obvious sense to me:

• Image type conversions. Jpegs to PNGs, Tiff to anything usable.
• OpenOffice to Microsoft Office. As much as I like OpenOffice nearly all of my clients are Office users, and I can just send them that format.
• Spreadsheet to CSV. Oh yes, you can do this within pretty much every spreadsheet tool, but hey why not build it in to this conversion tool.

This may be a really stupid idea, but if you built it and it was successful, Mr. Gates (Bill not Robert) may be knocking at your door to buy the technology. It’s just a thought.

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