Thing 24: Zamzar the File Converter

Who thinks up the names for these sites?
The 24th thing is Zamzar - Helene Blower's new best friend according to her 2007 Learning 2.1 posting. The website answers the not-so age-old question: "Have you ever wanted to convert files without the need to download software?" with a way to convert a file into another format.
The Discovery Exercise suggests that we convert a Word document into a pdf file, something I've only been able to do with the aid of the elderly but stalwart scanner in ZZ.
Hmmmmm...... How long does this take? It's only converting one measly sentence. Well- this seems to be a case of check your e-mail tomorrow for an answer and the magic .pdf.
What Helene says she really likes it for is to convert YouTube videos to .mpg files so you can use them in a PowerPoint presentation when you don't have ready (or reliable) access to the Internet. I always wondered how that could be done. That I would find useful.
As far as recommending this to customers- well- they may be disappointed. This is not (Zamzar! It was ONE sentence! What's the deal here?) for the impatient or on-demand user.
Not that I know anyone like that.

LATER- Caveat- it will take a few hours for the file to be converted and sent to you- at least that's how long it took for my sentence-long document to get to me. There are advanced features on Zamzar that you can take advantage of if you are willing to pay for them.