Tools to ease the online application process

If you are sorting out the documents you need to scan and upload for the online application and need to manipulate the transcripts and other supplemental documents, here are some tools that would help. See the 'Resources' tab for actual links to the tools if you are interested.

I got all my documents scanned with a 200 dpi setting on the scanner and extracted JPEG files (I believe this ensures that file size is low). I felt it would be easier to crop and edit the pictures, since that is inevitable. For example while scanning the document was at a slight inclination and I needed to first straighten it before creating the final PDF to upload.

I used Picasa to complete all the picture edits. Then used doPDF tool to convert all the jpegs to pdfs. This tool is free and does not create any watermarks. You can also specify what paper size you would want it to fit in, e.g. A3 or A4.

Later I needed to assemble the various pages of my transcript (each a single pdf at this point) to a single pdf. I used PDF reDirect PRO which is a 90-day free tool. Again spyware free and no watermark additions, this tool can merge multiple PDFs into a single one. OR it can also extract different pages from a multi-page pdf to create the pdf you want.

Hope this helps anyone who's struggling with the Dec deadline. Ofcourse the R1 guys must have already gone through this!