Filed under: E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services
Use Gmail to view Office files online
This weekend
my girlfriend and I were visiting my mom. My girlfriend needed to view a PowerPoint file someone had sent her, but my
mom's really, really old PC doesn't have PowerPoint and, believe it or not, is too old to run the free PowerPoint
viewer. I thought for a moment and then remembered that whenever someone e-mails a document in a common format to my
Gmail account, a handy "View as HTML" link shows up next to the "Download" link. "Forward it
to your Gmail account," I told her, and lo and behold a few seconds later she was able to view the file (albeit
with some funky formatting) right in Firefox.Yesterday the clever folks at Lifehacker printed basically the same tip I gave my girlfriend: If you're traveling and need to read a document but don't have the right app for it, send it to yourself using Gmail. It's a simple idea, but can be a lifesaver, and it works like a charm with PDFs, Office, and OpenOffice.org files.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Chris said 2:33PM on 3-20-2006
Adobe also has a little known service that's useful for those pesky PDF files. Send the file as an attachment to pdf2txt@adobe.com or pdf2html@adobe.com and they'll send you back the appropriate file (either text or html) via email.
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Jordan Running said 2:45PM on 3-20-2006
Great tip, Chris!
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J.T. Mill said 5:56PM on 3-20-2006
You guys always seem to post these tips they day I need them. Way to go guys!
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shadekh said 1:24AM on 3-21-2006
As always, a number of extensions exist for viewing pdf as html in firefox. i often use the pdfdownload extension as i work extensively with pdf files. it allows me to download it or view it as html. I believe you can simply "open" the file via firefox in case you have a local file.
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claudio said 4:16AM on 3-21-2006
you can use the same tip to view password protected documents (i tried it with a PDF and it works).
try it.
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