WE Week: Sue Griffey on Free, Online (No-Install) Resources for Evaluator Efficiency

I’m Sue Griffey, Director of the Evaluation Center in the Public Health Research group at Social & Scientific Systems in Silver Spring (MD) and blogger at Sue Mentors.

It never fails that the time that I’m crunching at a deadline for getting a report or presentation done is when I need to do something that I don’t have the right software for. And, in the era of more and more electronic security, I no longer have admin rights to install software on my company laptop.

Here are some of my go-to Rad Resources for free, online services that help me solve a myriad of professional needs. And none of them need to be installed while they work on a file on your HDD.

Rad Resource: Zamzar doesn’t require you to download software or create an account. I’ve used it to convert a multi-page Excel file to individual image pages so that Excel’s repeating header shows up on every page in pdf formatted documents. It’s fast, flexible, and has a variety of options to use.

Rad Resource: PDFSplit! allows you to split any pdf document into single pages. And you can also save a web page as a pdf file here instead of capturing a screen image.

Rad Resource: And one of my longtime favorites is Box (formerly box.net). We’ve been using it for more than 3 years to share files collaboratively in a complex project. It’s been extremely useful for an ongoing project where people are in different locations and also need different levels of access to different files. Box lets you set up a file structure with multiple sub-levels and define access to the folder at the lowest sub-level, if needed. You can email messages to people, leave comments on files, and have discussions so you have some collaboration/project management features. And there can be multiple administrators for folders as well. Best of all, the free account allows you 50GB of storage (and there are apps for smartphones and tablets).

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Washington Evaluators (WE) Affiliate Week with our colleagues in the WE AEA Affiliate. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our WE members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

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