Viewing ZIP and RAR Files Using Google Docs

The Google Docs Viewer is a pretty useful utility that can come in handy almost every day (unless you hardly receive emails with attachments).

Earlier this year it introduced support for a huge number of file types like Adobe Photoshop (.PSD), XML Paper Specification (.XPS) and many more. The main benefit of using the viewer is that it saves the time needed to download the file to your computer in order to view it. Also, if you don’t have the required software to view that type of file, this viewer is your best bet.

Now you can also view the contents of ZIP and RAR files using the Google Docs viewer. It’ll show the files inside the ZIP or RAR archive and also let you download them individually.

Let me show you an example of an email with a RAR attachment that I received recently. Check the following screenshot.

As you see, there’s a View link below the attachment. Until now I used to download such attachments and then extract them with ZipGenius, a great free winzip alternative. But I decided to check the view option and here’s what I found.

It shows all the files inside the zip/rar archive. You can view the Google Docs Viewer supported file types, download them individually to your computer and also print the PDF documents among them.

The feature isn’t just limited to the web version of Google Docs. If you are one of those who love to use Google Docs on mobile then you’ll be happy to know that this feature is available on Google Docs for Mobile too.

Overall, this definitely makes the Google Docs Viewer more useful. No need to download full archives now when you can quickly take a look at what’s inside it and which are the files you need.