Tired of installing PDF readers, Office programs, or TIFF editing software just to open up a document? Google Docs Viewer provides a simple solution for all of your document reading needs. Updated yesterday, it now even supports .doc files.
Google Docs Viewer is a web application that can open all of your Internet documents directly from your web browser. To use it, all you have to do is visit http://docs.google.com/viewer and enter the document URL. You don’t even have to log into a Google account! The viewer is compatible with the following document types:
- .doc (or .docx)
- .tiff
- .ppt
If you need to view a document from your computer, you can do that with regular Google Docs at http://docs.google.com/. Note that you will need a Google/Gmail account to use Docs, but an account is 100% free.
The viewer is rather groovy; it lets you zoom in or out and has page previews on the right-hand panel.
If you are using Gmail, you also enable the Google Docs Preview lab and preview .doc files directly from your email.
Overall it’s a groovy service and the new .doc format support is proof that Google is working hard to keep up with Microsoft’s online Office suite.
Dear Austin,
When I use a Firefox addin that will open docs using Google Docs, the document always opens up in HTML view which I cannot change to Doc view. It doesn’t matter which addin I use, I get the same result. When I open a document in Google Docs itself, documents open in doc view successfully. Is there some way to get my docs to open in Doc view instead of HTML? Thanks.
Peace,
BG