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Everything looks better when it's nicely wrapped. When you give a gift, you put it in fancy paper and stick a bow on top. When you hang a picture on the wall, you add a nice frame. It all just makes things look better. The same is true of many different types of documents you may create on your computer—wrapping a border around it can help it look more complete.

Page Borders offers a selection of dozens of borders that you can use to decorate cards, certificates, or anyplace else you'd like to add a fancy frame. Choose formal or informal page border designs, or pick a border for kids and school projects, sports and recreation, or even nature-themed borders—maybe perfect for the next garden club newsletter.

All of these page borders are available to download for free. They're available in Word DOC format, so you can add your own message or content, or as Adobe Reader PDF files, as well as PNG and JPG images. Or if you want to make some changes to the border itself, they're also available in a paid version as Adobe Illustrator AI files.

Download Printable Page Borders

A couple of weeks ago, we got a panicked late-night phone call from our daughter. She's away in graduate school and had an important deadline coming up for the next revision of her thesis. Oh, and by the way, her computer died. Turns out she had a recent copy of her document, but it was only as a PDF rather than a Word DOC. This meant that she couldn't make any edits, and she had a lot more to add before the paper could be handed in. The next day. Long story short, she spent many hours that night re-typing her paper on a borrowed computer. What she needed was easy access to an OCR tool, like BetterOCR.

OCR, Optical Character Recognition, is a process where software looks at a non-text document, like an image or a PDF file, and automagically figures out which of the shapes on the page represent letters and words, and then converts them to editable text that you can tweak with a word processor. BetterOCR is a tool that lets you do exactly that, and with the added benefit that it's an online service, so there's no software to download to your computer (or that borrowed computer you're using), and it's compatible with everybody's system.

To use BetterOCR, all you need to do is point your browser at their site and upload your document. They can work with PDFs, as well as PNG and JPG image files and others. Enter your email address, select the file—or files—you want converted, and press the magic button. Your job is added to their queue, and the little OCR elves get right to work. Depending on which level of service you choose, you can download the result or wait for it to be emailed to you.

There are three levels to choose from: Free OCR, which scans and converts your file, but then it's up to you to proofread and edit the result; Budget OCR, which brings in a human editor and guarantees a one-week turnaround for $0.99 a page; or their Better OCR service, which uses their best editors, turns your document around in three days with a 99% accuracy guarantee, for $1.99 per page. And no matter how you slice it, they're all better than re-typing that 40-page paper. Or receiving that parental procrastination lecture. Again.

Go to OCR Service

If you've got a website or blog, then you've got half the job done. While it's great to get the word out to let everybody know what's on your mind, or what products you've got to sell, it's important for you to know that people are actually finding their way to your site. Obviously you can't go out and look over folks' shoulders, since you don't even know who they are, so you need a better way to track visitors to your site.

Extreme Tracking has a tool they call their Free Tracker. It's easy to use: once you register for an account, there's just a snippet of code you need to paste into your site, and the tracking begins. Keep an eye on who visits and how often they come by. Grab information on which searches bring visitors to your site. You can even see which browsers they're using, which may help you to make the user experience even better by tailoring your pages to those browsers.

Since it's a free service, there are some limitations to what the Free Tracker can accomplish. Rather than a full history of visitors, at any time you have access only to information about your most recent twenty visitors. You're also limited to tracking only a single page. For greater functionality, the publisher recommends their paid version, but if you're just getting your feet wet in the visitor tracking arena, of if you have a relatively small following, this free tool may be just what you need.

Download Extreme Tracking Free Tracker

People flock to your website or blog because of all your great content, right? The articles you write are incisive and the products you sell are top-of-the-line. Maybe it's time to take it to the next level, and add some professionally-generated content to your site as well.

The folks at TheFreeDictionary have free content available for you to add to your site. Along with their namesake dictionary, you can choose items like a Word of the Day, Article of the Day, timely news stories, and more. Choose as few or as many of these items as you like. They've made it easy to just copy and paste the code into your website, and they've even got controls to let you fine tune the appearance of the content, choosing fonts, colors, and more so that it will all fit flawlessly into your site.

Free Website Content from TheFreeDictionary is free, as you might expect. Each item that you paste into your pages has a link back to their site, and you have to leave that intact.

Download Free Website Content

Teaching kids can be a greatly rewarding experience. Passing along the accumulated wisdom of the ages and getting the next generation ready to take their place in the world is a great way to make a difference. If you're going to do the best job possible, you're going to need the right supplies and materials for your lessons. Once you've bought books, pencils, and all the rest, you're looking at a big chunk of change, whether that's coming out of a school district's budget or your own bank account. One way to help those pennies go farther is to take advantage of free resources, like Blackline Masters.

Blackline Masters is a site that makes all different kinds of worksheets and templates available for anyone who teaches, whether it's teachers in a private or public school, or even parents who homeschool their children. There is a wide range of materials available, ranging from different types of graph paper (grids, polar layouts, and even logarithmic paper) through maps, national flags, music paper, and even a periodic table of the elements.

Blackline Masters are free to print or photocopy as many as you need. They're all available in PDF format, so you'll need a copy of Adobe Reader, or some other application that can read PDF files.

Download Blackline Masters

If you had a rough time with math in school, it may be because it all seemed just too abstract and because there really just wasn't any way you could gain hands-on experience in working with it. That means you probably didn't have access to GeoGebra.

GeoGebra is a tool for teaching and learning mathematics. Rather than just dry lecture or lifeless paper and pencil exercises, the user interacts with the program, allowing you to really understand what's going on when you lengthen one side of a triangle or change the angle of a vertex of a polygon. Grab a point or line and drag it across the screen, and you'll see locations and lengths updated in real time.

GeoGebra is a Java application. You can run it as a desktop application, or you can access it as a Java applet through your web browser.

Download GeoGebra

If you've got a little something you want to share with friends and co-workers, maybe you just shoot them an email. Or IM them. I suppose you could write a book. Or maybe you could just paste it.

JustPaste.it is a free online service that lets you pass information along to those who need to know. Just type or paste your information into the edit window, and you're good to go. They've got a WYSIWYG editor, or for real control, you can go in and edit the HTML yourself. It supports headings, font format and colors, images, and even lets you insert links. Whether it's a little snippet, or a more complicated chunk of content, it's easy to enter it. Press the Publish button and you'll get a URL you can pass along to others, so they can check out what you had to say.

You don't need to register to use JustPaste.it. All you do need is a web browser, and something to share.

Download JustPaste.It

It's awfully easy to get distracted when we're trying to get something done. Apps flashing across the desktop, and little reminders popping up all over the place. It's a wonder any work gets done. One answer to this problem are a whole class of apps that hide the rest of your system while you're focusing on a single task. Then there are minimalist editors with sparse interfaces that keep you from looking around while you work. A new addition to this category is QuietWrite.

A free online service, QuietWrite is a text editor with just a few bells, and no whistles. Basically, you point your web browser at their site and just start typing. You are allowed a little control over formatting—fonts, colors, that sort of thing—but mostly you just type. One added benefit here is that your work is auto-saved on a very regular basis. No more having to worry about things crashing since you last saved your work, because it's all done for you automatically.

You don't have to sign up to use QuietWrite, but once you do, then you can save and go back to your works-in-progress, as well as publish your masterpiece.

Download QuietWrite

Designing the layout of a room can be fun. After you've moved the couch from that wall to over under the window across the room for the tenth time, however, the joy may have gone out of your project. It would be nice to cut down the hard work just a tad.

Homestyler is a free online service from the Autodesk folks that lets you do just that. Set up your room, resize it as necessary, and then start adding furniture, fixtures, and more. It's a easy as dragging and dropping from palettes of pre-designed pieces, and a whole lot easier than moving that couch—or the piano—back and forth until you get things set just right. Choose from generic furnishings and appliances, or even grab brand-name ones for added realism. You can also include exterior items, like grass, decks, and pools.

All you'll need to use Homestyler is a recent web browser with Flash installed. And a creative idea or two.

Download Homestyler

Is your email inbox bursting at the seams? While there's no lack of spam that gets sent to us through no fault of our own, some of that clutter comes from decisions that we made. Like joining that underwater basket weaving listserv. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but who knew that your interest in submarine arts and crafts would wane? Multiply that by several other perhaps misguided subscriptions, and you've got a pile of preventable spam just waiting for you to turn the spigot off. Now you could read through all those messages and look for the unsubscribe information, or you could hand that task off to the experts.

Unsubscribe.com is a service that helps you unsubscribe to email. They've got a browser extension that works with Gmail and Yahoo accounts, and a plugin for Outlook. Or if you're using some other setup, you can always forward the email you want to unsubscribe from to them via email, and they'll take care of the rest. With a free account you're limited to five unsubscribes every thirty days, but that may be just the right amount to keep your mailbox from blowing up.

All you need to use Unsubscribe.com is email you want to get rid of.

Download Unsubscribe.com