Writing a newsletter or article can be very time consuming.

First, you have to create your content. Then you have to organize it. Fortunately, there are plenty of great tools online you can use and don't require you to clog your computer with more software.

Best of all, each of these tools is absolutely free to use.

Here are five tools you can use to help you with your newsletters and articles:

1. Newsletter Template Formatting your newsletter will probably give you more headaches than anything else.

You want to make it easy for your readers to read, and you want it to look professional when you send it out.

This site solves the problem. All you have to do is select the parts you want to include in your newsletter, cut and paste the elements, and hit submit. It will completely format your newsletter for you, and you can even get some great tips and resources to help you with your newsletter.

http://www.ossweb.com/ez-ezine-template.html

2. Email Formatting Utility Ever gotten a really great forward in your email you wanted to use, but it was too time consuming to take all of the >> out of it?

You don't have to do that anymore. This email formatting utility will strip any unecessary tags for you. You can also use it to format your newsletters and emails to the right character count.

http://www.jbmckee.com/formatit/index.htm

3. Article Formatter Ok, I admit it. Before I found this utility I used to cut and paste my articles into my word processing program just so I could get a word count.

Now you don't have to do that. Not only will this online tool give you a word count, it will also format your articles in an attractive format for submission.

This site is offered by the Freelance Writing Organization Int'l a large database of information for freelance writers.

http://www.fwointl.com/FWOFormatter.html

4. PDF Creator This may seem like an odd tool to recommend to a publisher or writer, but wait a minute.

Have you ever wanted to give away copies of your articles and newsletters to site visitors? What about the $249 price tag for Adobe Acrobat?

Then you have to consider your readers computers. What if they have a MAC?

Unless you have a format that can be read by both MACs and PCs you'll exclude certain readers from downloading your documents.

Besides, giving away copies of your articles and newsletters is a form of viral marketing for your business.

This site allows you to convert documents to both HTML and PDF. http://www.gohtm.com/

This site converts text to PDF. http://www.sanface.com/createpdf.html

5. Good Research Tools There are tons of places you can do research on the Web. That's the beauty of the Web.

That's also what's horrible about the Web. There's just too much great material online to find it quickly and easy.

Ref Desk - http://www.refdesk.com - is like having your own book shelf at your fingertips.

You can do searches in the major search engines, find dictionaries, word of the day, quote of the day, and more. There are so many resources located here, you may even want to make this your start page.

Find Articles - http://www.findarticles.com - is a large collection of print articles archived on the Web. It boasts over 300 print publications in its database.

Writing and publishing can become a time consuming task. Not only will these tools save you time, they'll save you money too.