September 16, 2010

New Look for Google Docs Viewer

Google's document viewer has a new interface that's more consistent with Google Docs. The viewer added a menu bar, a button that lets you save the file to Google Docs and a button for sharing the document with your contacts. The View menu includes a new feature called "compact controls" that hides the navigation bar and the header.


Google Docs Viewer is only useful for PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and TIFF files. It's integrated with Google search, so you can quickly preview PDF files without installing Adobe Reader or another PDF reader. There's also a Chrome extension that previews documents in Google Docs Viewer.

{ Thanks, Bogdan. }

12 comments:

  1. Glad to see the update, and I still prefer the built-in pdf experience. I hope Docs will switch to the built-in version (or have it be the default or quickly available) once it's got the bugs worked out.

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  2. i understand that the new version still does not allow you to collapse the right-side vertical bar showing the list of pages -- a major negative for someone like me, who likes to view two files side-by-side with screen split in two.

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  3. No wonder, I could no longer link to a specific page of PDF file. It used to work with this string, #:0.page.14 (any page number), but not anymore.

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  4. Why doesn't it use the new logo? That's starting to become a pet peeve for me...

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  5. Otherwise it's a pretty great upgrade.

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  6. Is this not available inside of Google Docs yet? I can't seem to find it.

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  7. This is ok . It look like adobe .pdf

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  8. I am building a real time collaboration tool - thinkj.com, I want to know if there is way to render doc in google doc viewer embed in my site without user having to own or log on using google login.

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  9. Starting November 15, 2010, this viewer comes up when I try to access a document in Google docs. There is apparently no way to download the document, which defeats the purpose of storing documents online! It makes Google docs useless!

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  10. Here's Google's answer:

    "This is a Known Issues in Internet Explorer, and we're working hard to fix this. You can track the problem on our Known Issues page: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=known_issues.cs&source=forum."

    Short answer: try another browser until this issue is fixed.

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  11. It is a great update but I would appreciate having a way to hide the sidebar.

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  12. Hello. Is it possible to hide the download file and save file menu items? I don't want anyone to download the file from my site, only view it.

    Thanks

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