How To Open Office Word, Excel, And PowerPoint Files In Any Web Browser
Microsoft Office is the most popular Office suite. Most people will need a solution for opening and editing files created with Microsoft Office apps like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. There are a lot of solutions by which we can open Microsoft Office files without installing Office on our computer.
The first solution is from Microsoft, Microsoft Office Viewer. Office Viewer is a simple app which can open Office documents without the need of installing Office suite. The second solution is to install another free Office suite which can read the formats of Microsoft Office like docx, xlsx, pptx etc.
Nowadays, opening files directly from the web is becoming popular. So you can open your documents in Google Docs or using Microsoft Office in SkyDrive.
But if you want to view documents right into your browser without the need of installing or downloading anything, then here is what you need to do:
- Go to Microsoft page “View Office documents online“
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Enter the URL of the document you want to view and press the create URL button.
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A new box will appear below the URL box. You can copy the URL and open it in any browser. This will open the document in any browser without any installation required.
In this method, the document needs to be hosted online instead of being saved locally.
If you want to be able to open local documents in the browser, you will need to have Google Chrome installed on your computer. Install the Chrome Office Viewer extension and open any Office document using Google Chrome. The extension is in beta and does not offer high quality view of the documents. So you will need to compromise with the quality if you are using this Chrome extension for viewing your documents. But it is certainly a great utility for quickly over-viewing the documents that have been downloaded from the Internet.
How do you view documents which you have downloaded from the Internet or are actually viewing online without downloading?
