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Open Office documents in Chrome with the Chrome Office Viewer

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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With Chrome Office Viewer you can open Office documents in Google Chrome Beta. It’s currently available for use with Chrome Beta as a 25mb extension – almost as big as the Chrome installer!

Once installed, you can drag any Office file into Chrome and it will open quickly, then you’ll be able to view it without formatting problems or changes. This is only a viewer, though. To edit your files, you need Microsoft Office, or can upload and convert them to Google Drive (which really doesn’t work well for Excel files).

As a document viewer, Chrome Office Viewer is actually really comfortable to use as you don’t have the big interfaces taking up space on your screen. The Google Chrome Blog also explains that opening a file in Chrome also protects you from malware that might be delivered by an Office document. The extension features a ‘sandbox’ that isolates files opened, so they cannot get wider access to your computer.

Download Chrome Beta for Windows or Mac, and then install the Chrome Office Viewer to try it out.

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

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