Skip to main content

How To Open Web Documents In Google Docs (Firefox, Chrome & Opera)

Google Docs has long been my preferred collaboration and note taking tool. I did try some alternatives but I always came back to Google Docs.
There are plenty of reasons to love Google Docs: the tool is quick and reliable. It has a set of features that allows you to play with it for multiple purposes: I for one found it great for collaboration. Its comparatively new and improved features (including real-time collaboration and chat) are awesome! Google Docs as a note taking tool works well as well. I found the tool really useful for easy organizing and accessing the information you come across online.
What’s more, Google Docs can improve your browsing experience a lot by allowing you to preview and open documents without having to download anything locally. Here are my favorite tools that make it easier to open doc, docx, pdf, ppt, pps and xls files in Google docs in Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera 11.00.

Firefox

Firefox has quite a few addons that integrate with Google Docs, my personal preferences being the following:

Open IT Online

The Open IT Online tool adds a new option to your download dialog that lets you open the file using Google Docs instead of downloading it locally. Besides Google Docs, the addon supports a few popular document and image hosting services including Zoho, View Docs Online and Vuzit to edit or view documents and Snipshot, Pixlr and Sumo Paint to edit or view images.
The addon also shows you the file size of the document you are about to open:
open web documents in google docs

Google Docs Viewer & Google Docs Preview

Two similar but less useful addons to preview documents in Google Docs are Google Docs Viewer and Google Docs Preview. They both add an extra option to your right-click context menu and they both support only PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX and TIFF files. It proved to be less usable to me as my right-click menu is pretty much cluttered already.
open documents in google docs

Import To Google Docs

While the above two tools support only PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX and TIFF files, this one makes it possible to open .XLS files you see in Google Search right in Google Docs. With it, for any XLS file you see in Google search results you will find an alternative link opening it in Google Docs:
open web documents

Google Chrome

Google Chrome also has quite a few extensions that allow you to open web documents in Google Docs. My favorite one is Ultimate Google Docs Viewer. It works via the right-click menu but it can also open specified file types in Google Docs automatically (you can enable and disable which files you want to open automatically in the Google Docs Viewer options).
It supports doc, docx, pdf, ppt and pps files.
open web documents
The options page allows to customize pretty much everything in the extension behavior including which file types to support and where to open them:
open web documents

Opera 11

Opera 11.00 does have one handy (and pretty reliable) extension that allows you to preview any web documents in Google Docs. It prompts for document preview when you click links pointing to downloadable documents.
Sadly, it works only with .DOC .PPT or .PDF files. (What? No .XLS file support? It’s all I download online!). Well, that’s probably because XLS files are not supported by Google’s Doc Viewer.
open web documents in google docs
Do you think opening documents in Google Docs is a handy option? Please share your opinions!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document
1 comment
Read more

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th
Post a Comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a
Post a Comment
Read more