Article by George Norman

On 20 Jul 2011

The nice thing about Gmail is that if someone sends you a spreadsheet, a presentation, a PDF or some other document, you don’t have to download that document onto your computer to view it. You can simply press the View button and the document your received will be opened with Google Docs Viewer; this way you can easily preview whatever document you received.

You may already know that Gmail has this sort of functionality to offer. You may also know that the Google Docs Viewer provides support for a fairly long list of file types. What you may not know is that Google Docs Viewer now provides support for ZIP and RAR archives. You may not know this because Google announced it a couple of days ago.


“Downloading files that you only need to preview can create unnecessary clutter on your computer,” commented Avner Aviad, Google Docs Viewer team. “While you can already use the Google Docs Viewer to view over 15 different file types in Gmail without downloading them, today we’ve added support for archive file types ZIP and RAR. Now, if someone sends you a ZIP or RAR file in Gmail, you’ll be able to view its contents from within your browser by clicking on View.”

If someone sends you an email and said email has a ZIP or RAR archive attached to it, when you press the View button you will be presented with a view of all the files included in the archive (including file type and file size). If you want to view one of the items included in the archive, place your mouse over it -> click Actions -> select View from the menu.

“We hope this removes the need to download full archives when you only need to work on select items,” added Aviad.

I mentioned above that Google Docs viewer provides support for a fairly long list of file types. Here’s the complete list:

• Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
• Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
• Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

Tags: Google, Gmail, Google Docs Viewer, Archive

I Hope you LIKE this blog post! Thank you!

What do YOU have to say about this

Popular News

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.