Of course, Excel is perfect for keeping records of personal finances and getting your bookkeeping and accounting activities in order. If you are an Excel novice or simply do not have the time to create your own spreadsheet designs, here are six fantastic and completely free Excel templates that can really help you out in your efforts to be your own accountant.

Year-end tax plan

When it comes to filing your taxes, planning ahead is essential. This is especially true if you are planning to do them on your own. Use this Excel template to keep your finances in order all year round and successfully prepare yourself for the year-end tax filing process.

Loan calculator with extra payments

If you have a lot of loans that you are trying to keep up with, this Excel template can be of great help. The template allows you to input details that will enable you to generate a loan amortization schedule for yourself. Simply input all of the important data – such as loan amounts, interest rates, and loan periods – and see where you stand. If you are looking to pay back your loans quickly and effectively, this template will enable you to plan your goals out effectively.

401(k) retirement account planner

Planning your retirement doesn’t have to be a hassle if you have a quality way of keeping track of everything. Set your goals and meet them using this template that will enable you to calculate your needed monthly retirement income for meeting your retirement goals. You can also use the template to see what your expected monthly income after retirement age so that you can plan accordingly.

General ledger

Here is a basic ledger that will help you to keep up with all of your personal and family accounting needs. If you are looking for an easy to use template to map out your family budget and document your expenses, this is a great one made for exactly that purpose.

Detailed revenue plan

More and more people who run their own businesses tend to want to do everything themselves – even the bookkeeping. This template can help you to easily forecast revenue during the fiscal year. Knowing how your revenue is coming in over the year and being able to forecast its ends results can give you a better understanding of the entire process and enable you to pick out trends that could help your business improve over time.

Start-up capital estimate

Do you want to start your own business? Check out this Excel template that can help you get your financials in order if you are looking to go out on your own in the business world. Use the template to add up all of your expected expenses in order to create a plan for putting your personal business plans into motion.

These six are only the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft offers many more useful spreadsheet templates at their site for a variety of uses. To browse them, visit their official site at this address.

]]> http://blog.cometdocs.com/6-free-excel-accounting-templates/feed 0 http://blog.cometdocs.com/6-free-excel-accounting-templates http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/cometdocs/feed/~3/ebDlFcsyvNk/three-steps-for-preventing-data-loss-while-working-in-ms-office http://blog.cometdocs.com/three-steps-for-preventing-data-loss-while-working-in-ms-office#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:24:27 +0000 sandrina@cometdocs.com http://blog.cometdocs.com/?p=1121 Read more »]]> Many of us have faced frustration after losing hours of work due to a computer crash or some other type of hardware failure. That is why it is always useful to think in advance. Microsoft Office has excellent features which enable automatic saving settings that can prevent users from losing their work.

Here’s a look at how some of these features work.

Auto-save

No matter if you are working in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, every document you are working on is being autosaved by default every 10 minutes. By going to File – Options – Save, we can access these settings and change them.

If 10 minutes is a too long of a period for you, you can lower it. Also, you can see where all autosaved files are being stored on your computer, so that you can know where to access them later.

Creating back-up copies

A useful thing you might want to do is create an automatic copy of each document you are working on. A back-up copy contains all the data that was inputted before the last saving of the document. So it doesn’t contain the latest update, but it is nonetheless useful because it’s better to have something than nothing in the case of a hardware failure and loss of work. Each back-up is located in the same folder you saved the original one in and you can recognize it by its .wbs extension. To enable back-up copies go to File – Options – Advanced and find a field Always create a back-up copy.

Recover damaged files

MS Office has a useful feature that can recover damaged files. If a file can’t be opened, just go to Open – click the drop menu and choose Open & repair.

In some cases this will not be able to restore your damage files, but in a majority of cases the documents will be able to be recovered this way.

Unfortunately, there is no option for converting documents to MP3s, only to WAVs, which are much larger files. However, it shouldn’t be hard to find a free WAV to MP3 converter online either.

Either way, this software is open source, minimalistic and easy to use. It works with both doc and docx files.

Once we have uploaded the doc file, choose one of three voices. It is also possible to change the speed and volume of each voice as well to get the voice that is most agreeable for you.

The process is pretty fast. It should also be noted that Audiodocs works best when your Word document is written in English.

This could leave you without much of the information you shared on these social networks and the contacts that you have built. That’s why it is always a good idea to make copies or backups of all your important information from these websites so that you will not be completely left in the dark if you ever lose access to this information unexpectedly.

Contacts from the popular business-centric LinkedIn are especially important, because here you would probably be storing the contacts of co-workers and important clients. Losing access to these contacts can definitely have negative effects on your job and your business practices in general.

Thankfully, LinkedIn enables you to make a backup copy of all of your contacts. Contacts on this social network are saved by clicking on Contacts in the upper menu and then selecting the Export Connections option in the lower corner of the window.

The contacts will be exported as a CSV file. Even though the options listed are Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Mail and others, this format can be opened in Microsoft Excel, just like Google Contacts can be exported and opened in Excel.

For importing CSV data into Excel go to Data – From Text and the import process will start.

The exported contacts will contain the names and the email addresses of all of your LinkedIn contacts, which you can then safely store so that you do not run the risk of losing these important names and numbers.

The CSV format is very versatile and can be opened in LibreOffice as well. Import is done automatically with LibreOffice as soon as you open .csv format in LibreCalc.

That is why many people look to convert PDF documents into HTML very regularly.  If you have a page or two of PDF, you can do it manually, but if the PDF contains a lot of pages, converting them all at once can save a significant amount of time.

Luckily that is one of conversion formats that Cometdocs offers and supports, and we will show you how it is done.

To start the conversion, the first thing you need to do is to upload a file into the Clipboard.

After that, drag the PDF file into the Convert tab and choose PDF to HTML from the offered conversion possibilities.

Enter you email address and click Send if you are not registered, or simply click Convert if you are a registered Cometdocs user.

The conversion should take longer than a couple of minutes and a download link will be waiting for you in an email or in your Store tab shortly.

As you can see, the conversion output presented as one of multiple HTML pages, which can be found in one zipped file. After downloading the zipped file to your computer, you will have all of the pages ready to be added to your website. Images are also put as a part of a new HTML document and can be found in a separate folder inside zipped file. It doesn’t matter whether your PDF contains tables, forms, images or other uncommon data, they will all be presented accurately in the new HTML format files.

Being able to give someone your business card instead of asking them to write down or memorize your email address or phone number could make all the difference when trying to build new business contacts.

If you are looking for an easy-to-use and absolutely free program for making your own professional looking business cards look no further than CardWorks.

The program lets you pick a design and then simple enter your information in to get a fantastic business card made for you instantly. Once the design is finished, simply export your new business card as a PDF and it will be ready for the printing press.

The interface for CardWorks is incredibly intuitive. Here’s how to use it.

You can pick the design for your business card from the menu at the top.

Once you have chosen the card design that you want, type in the information that you want on the card on the left side of the interface. This is where you put in your name, the name of your company, your contact phone number, email and whatever else you want to put on your business card.

You can also input your company logo or a picture of yourself onto the card through this left hand side menu.

Once you have picked your design and entered your information, you can play with the color schemes as well to further personalize your business card.

When you have completed the process and are happy with what your business card looks like, click on Export and export the file as a PDF.

In the export process, you can select the size of the paper and the number of cards you want to print per page (the size of the cards), and any other details you want to prepare before printing.

We have already talked about mindmaps and how to create  them using Microsoft Word, but today we are going to present you one more useful, free tool for creating them – FreeMind. While this tool doesn’t particularly look modern or impressive, its abilities for creating and adjusting mindmaps are basically limitless.

When using FreeMind, each concept or idea is presented with a node. Click on Insert to add a new node. Nodes can be siblings or children, depending on the relationships you assigned to them. A relationship between multiple nodes is presented through links that can be hyperlinked to take you to corresponding sections of the mindmap. To insert these links, go to Insert – Hyperlink.

Users can also insert notes, speech bubbles and other text for further explanations of their mindmaps. This comes in handy, especially when you are presenting your mindmap to other people and you want them to be able to understand it easily.

There are also many options in terms of selecting icons, colors and node sizes when creating your mindmaps, so it really allows you to make your mindmap look great and the options let you personalize and tailor the maps to your personal preferences. Nodes can be folded and unfolded so that you have have a clearer view of what’s going on, no matter how many you are adding on to the mindmap.  Pretty much every attribute of the node is editable, which really provides you with many options when you are putting together your mindmap.

Once you have created a mindmap that you are happy with, click Export to save the mind map on your computer. As you can see, PDF, PNG, XML,  JPEG and more are offered as possible formats for saving the project.

Best of all, this tool is open source, and therefore completely free for use in every environment.

For example, if you want to delete a page from your PDF file or change the order of the pages, one of the ways to do this is to convert the PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or other formats with Cometdocs, make the necessary changes, and then convert the documents back to PDF – which can all also be done with Cometdocs.

But we are going to show you a faster way with a neat open source software for managing PDF documents, PDFSam.

Among the many options it offers, with PDFSam users can split a PDF into smaller parts, change the order and position of pages in a document, merge multiple PDFs into one and much more.

Here is how you can perform some of these tasks:

Separating one PDF into multiple pages

Upon installation, choose the Split tab, add the PDF with the Add option into the interface, and then choose the appropriate option. As you can see, it is possible to extract single pages from one PDF, odd or even pages only, and much more.

Now click on Run to start the procedure, which takes no time at all. Be careful not to choose to save the files in the “Same as source”  destination folder if you do not want the original file to be replaced and lost.

Rearranging pages

To rearrange the order of the PDF pages, choose Visual reorder. After uploading the file, all the pages will be presented in the form of thumbnails. You can now select the pages and move, rotate or delete them one by one. Everything is pretty intuitive visually.

All in all, PDFSam packs a lot of power for a free tool and can help you manage your PDF files in many ways. We have shown you a couple of nice features, but be sure to check the software out if you want to see what else it can do.

Here is how users can do this:

If you are a registered user, first log out from Cometdocs. Upload a file to the Clipboard.

The maximum file size is 100MB, but that should be enough for most user needs. Also, you can manage only one file at a time, so if you have more of them try zipping them. Premium users don’t have that limit. Wait for the upload to finish and then drag the file to the Host tab.

You will then receive a public sharing URL. This sharing URL doesn’t contain any user information and it is a temporary link. After 24 hours, it gets deleted from our servers.

It is important to note, however, that registered users have much more control over their file sharing settings. They can stop share their files and stop sharing them at anytime. Registered users can also store and convert their files and documents as part of their accounts.

There are a couple of ways we can do this and it all depends on our needs.

For example, if you want to convert only one PDF page or part of it into an image format, you can use the snapshot option of whatever PDF reader you are using. Here is where that option is found within Adobe’s PDF Reader.

However, doing this for a large number of pages can be a very time consuming. But with Cometdocs, you can do it very easily.

Converting PDF files to image formats like JPG, PNG, TIFF and others is done very easily with Cometdocs. Just upload the PDF to your Cometdocs Clipboard and then drag it to the Convert tab. It can be any type of PDF, either scanned or regular.

Under the conversion options, choose the image format you want to create. As you can see, among the offered formats, you will find all of the most popular image formats like JPG, TIFF, BMP, PNG and GIF.

Now go to the Store tab, where you will find a zipped archive containing all of the images created from the PDF. You will see here every page individually created as an image format file.

You can now download the zipped archive, store it, or transfer and send it to somebody else.

Naturally, if the PDF is large, the conversion might take a couple of minutes. Believe it or not, this option is offered to both free and premium users.

You will notice that both the original PDF and the new image files will be saved in the archive. You can delete the original PDF by selecting the bundle, clicking Delete and leaving only the zipped images in the archive.