Office Archives - Philipp's Tech Blog

Aug 09 / 2009
Comments Off on Extract text from PDF files

Extract text from PDF files

Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) has reached great popularity over the last years and is the number one format for easy document exchange. It comes with great features such as embeddable images and multimedia, but also has rather unpleasant properties. The so called Security Features represent a simple Digital Rights Management (DRM) system and allow PDF authors to restrict the file usage. Using the DRM system, authors can allow or deny actions such as printing a file, commenting or copying content.

Even though this is a good idea for some situations, most of the times, it’s just annoying: Collecting ideas for seminar papers or a thesis, for instance, is almost impossible without being able to Copy & Paste certain paragraphs from the PDF.

Sep 30 / 2008
48

Linux, Office, Scripting, Synchronization

GCALDaemon deb-package for Ubuntu/Kubuntu

GCALDaemon (project doesn’t exist anymore, was at http://gcaldaemon.sourceforge.net/) is a great tool to synchronize many of Google’s services such as Google Calendar and Contacts with your local PC. Unfortunately, the installation on Ubuntu/Kubuntu and any other Linux distribution is still not the most comfortable. For this reason, I sat down some hours and packed the tool into a deb-package and additionally added a nice command line tool to simplify some of the basics.

Jul 29 / 2008
4

Office

Excel: Add weekdays to date (VBA)

Since many companies work with Microsoft Excel it is often necessary to be inventive in order to implement the required functionality in your worksheet.

In some applications you might want to calculate a deadline date within the week, e.g. to make sure that a product or service will be delivered within a time frame of max. 10 working days.

May 16 / 2008
4

Office

Launch Nautilus in the current working directory

Working on the console is sometimes tiring, especially when you have to rename files. Using Nautilus is much quicker for these types of actions. The problem is, that if you’re working in a deep depth of your file tree and your path is very long, it may take you some extra seconds to open this path in the Nautilus browser. So wouldn’t it be much easier to simply type naut on the console to open Nautilus with the current working directory?