Our executive admin came by asking if there was anything she could use to convert some photos from color to black-and-white. Assorted people have Photoshop, but she didn’t want to take up anyone else’s time, she just needed something quick to paste into a slide/report/whatever.

Trivial with Preview.app on a Mac (in fact, hard to avoid, since the misnamed app autosaves even accidental changes made to any image or PDF you view…), but she couldn’t find anything in a stock Windows 7 install that would do it. I vaguely remembered having tripped over some image-modifying tools in Microsoft Word, so I pasted a work-safe sample photo into a new document, right-clicked, selected the obvious-looking “Format Picture…” item, and found tools for cropping, resizing, and recoloring. Ten seconds later, I right-clicked the photo again, selected “Save as Picture…”, and we were done.