Is Your Gear out of Sync?

I hear this complaint from people all the time: They work at a company that gives them a top-of-the-line desktop PC, an ultra-thin laptop, and a slick personal digital assistant. All of this gear is great at what it does, but often it's out of sync with other people's systems. As a result, the company's work loses its flow: The art department sends an electronic version of a brochure to the product manager -- who can't read the copy. The CEO sends the sales team an email attachment containing the latest ad-projection figures -- but no one can decipher the data. Meanwhile, two new hires are fuming over how long it takes to coordinate the company's master contact database with the contact program on their laptops.

Top-of-the-line computer gear doesn't automatically guarantee that your work will flow freely. You still must be familiar with various digital languages, and you still must equip your system with the right tools.

This edition of Powertools will help make the stuff of work -- from email attachments to spreadsheets to Web pages -- intelligible to all. Consider the five characters described below: No matter which of these descriptions matches your problem, there's a solution that will get you in sync with colleagues and customers alike.

Frequent Filer

Racks up lots of files by trading them promiscuously; encounters turbulence when trying to read strangely coded documents.

When it comes to file formats, the computing world is a Tower of Babel. Just about every program has its own special format or language. Indeed, even different versions of the same program sometimes use different codes. One version of Microsoft Word for Windows, for example, may be unable to read documents stored by another version of Word for Windows. To get different files to speak the same language, get Conversions Plus 4.5, from DataViz.

Conversions Plus, a multilingual file-format translator, can turn a MacWrite II file into a Word 97 file, or render a PICT graphic as a BMP graphic. Don't worry about which program the file was created in: Conversions Plus will recognize the program and then translate the file. The software enables your computer to read virtually any type of file, for either Macintosh or Windows. You can even convert a file into a format that allows you to edit it, and then store the file in yet another format -- or in the same format that the original creator of the file used.

For anyone who's ever received an email attachment but couldn't open it, Conversions Plus features a utility, called Attachment Opener, that decodes and decompresses attached files, allowing you to view them as legible text. If you never know which format the files in your attachments folder will be in, you'll find Conversions Plus to be an invaluable tool.

Coordinates: $100 (includes Attachment Opener). Conversions Plus 4.5, DataViz Inc., 800-733-0030, www.dataviz.com

Master Disseminator

Sends out mass mailings of documents that, inevitably, some recipients can't read.

Emailing a single document to hundreds of people can make you wish you were licking stamps again. Half of those people are bound to email you back, complaining that they can't read the file. The solution is to use a file format that everyone can work with: Adobe Acrobat's PDF (portable document format). A PDF file can be read from any computer that's equipped with Adobe Acrobat Reader, a program that you can download from the Web.

Acrobat Reader works on all types of computers. A PDF file will appear on all systems in exactly the form in which it was originally created. You can even read a PDF file from within a Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer.

To create documents in the PDF format, you'll need Acrobat 3.0. Load up this software, and the next time you mass-mail a spreadsheet, none of your recipients will be able to say that they can't read it.

Coordinates: Free (Adobe Acrobat Reader); $295 (Adobe Acrobat 3.0). Adobe Systems Inc., 800-272-3623, www.adobe.com

Office Shuttler

Sometimes works at home, sometimes works at corporate HQ; travels so much between offices that files tend to get out of sync.

When I got my first laptop computer, about a dozen years ago, I also got a new kind of headache: How to transfer important files and programs from my desktop PC to my portable computer? Eventually I found a cure: Traveling Software's LapLink, which remains one of the smoothest, most reliable go-between options for moving files and data between a notebook computer and a desktop machine -- or, indeed, between any two computers.

With LapLink Professional 2.0 installed on both systems, you can copy and coordinate files between your PC and your laptop -- no matter where you're working. You can connect the machines directly by using a modem, a simple serial cable, or the Internet. LapLink Professional also supports USB (universal serial bus) connections. (A USB cable from Traveling Software costs an additional $40.)