If you’ve used Google or Gmail in the past I’m sure you’ve come across a PDF file that you’ve wanted to quickly view, rather than download. Google has been offering the quick view of PDF Files, Word Documents and PowerPoint’s for quite some time now, but now they are expanding those formats to support the 12 most requested formats.
Google is now supporting the following formats, in addition to the ones it already supports:
- 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)
Just like PDFs, DOCs and others that Google has previously supported, these new file types can be easily viewed in Gmail, Google Search or Google Docs Viewer. This is something that many people have requested, including myself, for Google to add. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google adds additional support for more file formats in the future, possibly to cover all Microsoft applications and less popular file formats.
While the support for all of these files isn’t perfect, it is still a great way to get some quick information or even view PDF files on a computer which doesn’t have a PDF reader.
