Your PDF to Excel Conversion Story

Thank you again for your willingness to share your PDF to Excel conversion story with us. We would love to hear why you were looking for a PDF to Excel converter and how using PDF2XL worked for you.

We only ask two things:

1. No foul language please. If your feedback is not positive – that’s OK. In fact it’s more then OK, we learn a lot from feedback. But please… no foul language.

2. If possible, please write your story in English.

And that’s it. Just scroll down to the end of the page and leave your comment there. I am really looking forward to your feedback.

How to Reclaim Your Facebook News Feed

As you make more Facebook friends you might find the random noise increases. If anything, many of the recent Facebook changes have made this more of a problem.

It is a strange thing when you might regret making and adding friends!

The worst offenders are the stupid farm, mafia, and so on games and applications that spew random irrelevant rubbish into your news feed. When those appear, nuke them!


What if the rubbish is posted by actual friends and not the games they play?

Worry not, it is possible to silence the worst culprits without banishing them from your Facebook altogether. Some people you want to hear everything about, others you are quite content to go check in on them once in a while – this is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed about!


When an offending message appears, mouse over the right hand side and a “Hide” button should show.

Click the hide button that pops up next and you can then hide that person from your news feed.

Next time that person posts a status update you will have to go to their account to see it.

Obviously doing this might be considered “too little, too late” – best is to block people at the source. While you can not predict who out of your friends will turn bad, at least you can only add people who you know, like and trust!



If you change your mind and you find you are missing finding out about your friend’s high scores or most recent virtual flock, you can always go back to the options and allow those “Bejewelled” status updates back into your feed.


Is the Trinidad and Tobago Government a Software Pirate?

Two weeks ago I was doing a vanity search for Cogniview’s name (for those of you that are not regular readers – Cogniview is the company that hosts this blog and the maker of a PDF to XLS converter).

Back to the story… I was absentmindedly browsing through the search results when I noticed something funny right after Cogniview’s Wikipedia Article…

Vanity Search Results

Well… It seems that for some reason, the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office was selling one of our products. And at a discount. Funny, I thought to myself, I don’t recall signing a distributor agreement with the Trinidad and Tobago government. And we NEVER sell at a discount. So I followed the link to see what’s up:

Eudi Pirated

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Apparently, someone at the foreign office of Trinidad and Tobago has set up a store selling pirated software copies. I kept looking around and found out that all the software sold on this site was either bought at “an auction” or is a discontinued product line…

Lies Lies Lies

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Well… I can tell you that we never sell software at ‘auctions’ – whatever those are – and we did not discontinue any of our product lines. Besides, I am guessing that Adobe didn’t discontinue it’s Acrobat product line and it’s still being sold at huge discounts on the Trinidad and Tobago software store -

All adobe products stolen

Click image to enlarge

Further investigation into the matter shows that the guys (or gals) at the ‘Trinidad and Tobago software store’ take fraud very seriously…

User Agreement

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I am pretty used to our software getting hacked and sold at a discount. That’s the price you pay when you sell software, I guess. But we found out that most people are decent and don’t go looking for pirated copies. (Either that, or they are afraid of the viruses that are installed along with those copies). But this is the first time an actual government office site was used to steal our products.

I tried contacting the Trinidad and Tobago foreign office several times but to no avail.

So… What do you think we should do next? Can we ask that the Trinidad and  Tobago official site be de-listed from Google? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

The Hidden Productivity Benefit of Slow Software Tools

As a geek, I thought I would ever say this. But the day has come where I finally found a reason to be happy with slow software!

I know, crazy, right?

When we all want bigger, better, faster, more, to actually be happy something is running slowly seems … well, just wrong.

And I thought the same, until it happened to me.

Or rather, to my email.

This strange realization happened when I moved my email from an assortment of cobbled together solutions, to (mostly) Gmail. Or rather, Google Apps for domains.

Google has put out a cool software tool that allows you to upload your mail.app email up to a Google Apps email account. I took this as an opportunity to unify my ~10 years worth of email into one online, searchable, central database. Google search is very efficient, plus  the tagging and filters will be a real boon.

One weekend of uploading later and I had my email all ready and waiting at my finger tips. Awesome!

Turns out though there is one flaw I hadn’t considered.

Man, is my mail sloooooooooooow.

I mean, really slow.

Why is this happening? What is the cause? Could be because I am forwarding my chrisg.com email to the apps mail. Could be just that Google is a slow service. Maybe it is because their IMAP implementation is poor. Not sure yet.

What I do know is this whole slow mail situation has had a side benefit that I never expected.

When it takes ten minutes to get an email reply, I am less likely to get involved in email chit-chat, and I get more work done!

Previously I would immediately respond to any email that arrived within seconds, and again and again until the natural end of the email thread. I can’t do that now, the response times have been taken out of my hands. When I alt-tab to another application and alt-tab back there are no new messages waiting for me.

OK, yes, I should shut my email off (and that is probably the real situation), but being an email addict, I will take this solution for now.

Thank you slow email!

iPad Vs Geeks

I am a geek but sometimes even I get mad at the geek mentality.

You can’t have missed the bru-ha-ha over the Apple iPad.

Apparently it’s all wrong …

Now, some of that stuff I think will be present in version 2 (the camera seems pretty much guaranteed) but it amazes me how so many geeks think this product is aimed squarely at them.

Not for Geeks

OK, so the mighty Steve made a big play about it being better than a netbook, but in my view this has always been a Kindle killer.

It’s a colour Kindle that runs applications.

A computer Grandma will love

Regardless if you think this is an ebook reader (I do, but you do not have to agree with me), ask yourself what your parents and older relatives do with computers, or want to do. Think about your friends and relatives who are not IT savvy but would like to be more online for whatever reason.

Which of those things really need a fully equipped computer, operating system, or even multi-tasking? None is the answer.

Flash could help some of that, but it is by no means essential to the experience.

Geeks need not apply.

I think geeks need to remember that IT is not their sole territory any longer. When the iPod came out the geeks revolted saying it was all wrong, but those white earbuds soon became a badge of cool (something we geeks do not understand) and the geeks were silenced by sales data.

I’m not saying the iPad will be as big as the iPod. I am saying that the geeks need to butt out and let the actual target market decide.

Personally, I never buy version 1 of anything unless I absolutely have to. I’m waiting for the iPad 3gs like I did the iPhone ;)