Use the Google Docs Viewer to View All Kinds of Files

There are times when you get a file in email that’s important and you are desperate to check it out, but, to your dismay you find that the corresponding program to open that file isn’t installed on your computer. For example, you need to check out a photoshop file (.psd) but you don’t have photoshop. Sounds familiar? It’s actually a pretty common situation that most of us encounter almost every day.

The good news is that now you can use the Google Docs Viewer to view all such files. Well, not all, but a most of the major file formats for sure. That’s what Google announced sometime back.

Following are the 12 new file formats now supported by the Google Docs viewer.

• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

So, as you saw, there are a lot of major file formats included in that list. From now on you don’t need Adobe Illustrator to view a .AI file, or Photoshop to view a .PSD file. You could just upload those files to your Google Docs account and view it there.

Obviously, you would not be able to edit them there but the viewing works pretty well.

Also, in case you’ve forgotten, the Google Docs Viewer is integrated with Gmail. So if you get such a file as an attachment in Gmail, you could directly open it and view it online. An example of that is shown in the screenshot below.

Overall I think this could prove to be very useful for just about everyone who spends considerable time online every day dealing with files and documents.

What do you think?