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This Online Office File Shrinker Has Potential
It's a common problem. You've created a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, using Microsoft Office, but the file is much larger than it should be. Which takes up unnecessary space on your hard disk, and can lead to problems if you want to send it to someone by email.
In theory, a new free online service called PocoDoc sounds like it could be the ideal solution. Upload a Word, Excel or PowerPoint data file, in either DOC/XLS/PPT or DOCX/PPTX/XLSX format, and some intelligent software will shrink the file for you, while retaining the original file format. In some cases, the service claims that a compression of up to 95% can be achieved.
It all sounds great . Sadly, there are some potential problems with this particular service, and indeed with any service which works in the same way. Firstly, you need to upload your file to the PocoDoc web site, which raises privacy issues. Secondly, your shrunken file gets returned to you by email, so it won't work if your email provider doesn't like dealing with relatively large files. Thirdly, the service only accepts files of 20 MB or smaller, which kinda defeats the purpose altogether.
Also, for some odd reason, you can choose from 20 different compression levels when you're uploading your file for conversion. Why? Surely everyone is going to want to receive the smallest possible file in return? If some of the options result in loss of quality, eg in included graphics, then they're not worth offering and should be ditched.
Having said that, PocoDoc is a useful idea, which could come in handy. If you create an electronic newsletter, for example, your subscribers will appreciate receiving a file that's as small as possible, having been run through the PocoDoc service before you distribute it. But the whole concept of using email for the service is slightly flawed, and I'd love to see an ftp version (for both send and receive) made available, along with a lifting of the 20 MB limit.
To make up your own mind, check out www.pocodoc.com. It's free.
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Comments
We plan on always providing this as a free service and eventually offering a low price desktop version with more advanced features. We wanted to provide users with an easy way to try our product without having them install any software.
Thanks for the clarification.
Always great to see direct interaction from developers.
Will this always remain free with a more advanced payware option or is the beta just being used to launch a (eventual) commercial product?
I'd like to thank the reviewer for their review. The online version of PocoDoc is still in beta and we are trying to get feedback from users to help improve our product. Any ideas are appreciated.
Our intent for PocoDoc was to provide a service to users who send Office documents as attachments through email and/or to users over low bandwidth (i.e. mobile) connections. As the reviewer mentioned, many email providers impose a limit on the size of attachments, which is why we want to shrink documents. Admittedly, sending the resultant file back to the user through email, if it's size hasn't been reduced enough, poses an issue. We chose email to deliver the optimized files because it is something most people use.
We also intelligently compress any images contained within the document. This is controlled by the several levels of optimization. PocoDoc tries to compress the images to meet the size constraints of the user while maintaining the highest perceived quality. Again, our thought was that not being able to send a document at all or in a timely manner because of size constraints is worse than sending a lower quality version on time.
We're lifting the limit on the size of the documents submitted to our online version of PocoDoc. However, the time it takes to submit a file is limited by the user's internet upload speed, which my be slow. We also take users' privacy very seriously. All email addresses and files are used internally for testing purposes only. We will not distribute this information to any third party, nor will we use it to spam our users.
Lastly, we are coming out with a free lite desktop version which operates in a similar manner except the optimized files are returned through the lite version and not through email. This should be out by Jan. 2010.
I apologize for be so longwinded. Please use PocoDoc and provide us with any feedback you may have. Thanks.
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