Gene Notes

Some random and some not-so-random thoughts on family history.

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Panic Time! What Happens When ...

The other day I wrote about my search for Nathaniel Davidson, my great great great grandfather on my dad's Percival side. What I didn't mention at the time is the near heart attack I had when I discovered I couldn't open a lot of Word Documents that I imported into my Mac from my old Windows computer. These documents were letters I had painstakingly transcribed years ago (1990) from letters my dad and I photocopied from a scrapbook my late Aunt Shirley did for her late husband, John Stearns Percival, my dad's brother. My uncle died in 1982.

Now, I still have the copies of the letters and the original transcriptions. But it is a lot easier to go to that file on my computer and insert it into a blog. I immediately went looking for a program that would read them and convert them into .rtf files.  I tried a couple and finally settled on The Document Converter. After setting up a trial subscription for 7 days, I got busy. The premise is simple, the program uploads your file into their cloud, converts it and shoots it back to you in the format you desire. I was very happy with my results.

The nice thing about the program is that it is not limited to converting document files to rtf. You can convert to pdf, you can convert image files and convert into html or xml.

Copyright 2010-2018, ACK for Gene Notes

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