Make PDFs and Word Docs Searchable in Gmail
One of the drawbacks with using Gmail as a resume database is that you cannot search within attached PDF and Word docs. For small numbers of resumes there are a simple ways to overcome this using Google Docs. However, the problem is a real issue when uploading large numbers of resumes from your computer.
There is little to no point bulk uploading documents to Gmail if you cannot search for them later. The easiest way to deal with this is to convert them to a searchable format beforehand, either text or HTML formats.
There is no shortage of bulk converters out there. Many are free and do a passable job. I’ve tested a lot of free PDF2TXT and PDF2HTML converters. The ones that cost $200 plus may be worth every penny. That depends on what you need
For converting PDFs to text PDFZilla is a great alternative to crappy free-stuff and overpriced who-knows-what-it-does software.
To date I have only paid for two products to support my googling. One is Gmail Keeper
the other is PDFZilla. Both are, in my opinion, worth every penny. However, I could have got PDFZilla for free had I seen this before paying $29.95 for a license:
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Feel free to reference this post, help spread the word and ask for your free license in return.
I’ll be posting a tutorial that walks you through the process of downloading, converting and uploading bulk resumes. If you can’t wait for that, you can work it out easily enough: OutWit Docs to download [video tutorial], PDFZilla to convert and GSpace to upload.
Zilla Word To Text Converter is free and handles the Word.doc problem. If you can get over the nag-page it makes a great compliment to round out this work around for Gmail’s search-in-docs shortcoming.
