Google Docs can be used for multiple purposes like as a blog authoring tool, Excel or Word to PDF Converter and of course as an online documentation platform. Now a days, lot many small offices are running on Google Docs using the awesome features available over there. Recently, Google Docs team added support for 12 more file formats which includes .XLS ( Microsoft Excel ), .XLSX( Microsoft Excel ), .PPTX ( Microsoft PowerPoint 2007/2010 ), .PAGES ( Apple Pages ), .AL ( Adobe Illustrator ), .PSD ( Adobe Photoshop ), .DXF (Autodesk AutoCad ), .SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics ), .EPS ( PostScript ), .PS ( PostScript ), .TTF ( TrueType ), .XPS ( XML Paper Specification ). Google Docs viewer already supports file formats like .DOC and .DOCX (Microsoft Word), .CSV, .HTML, .TXT, .RTF, .PDF ( Adobe PDF ) etc. Now here is how you can use Google Docs to open frequently used file formats like Excel, PowerPoint, Apple Pages, Adobe Photoshop etc.
Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, PDFs, Photoshop files comes in our mailbox as an attachment in our daily work life. If you are on Gmail, then you can see a new “View” link available just beside or below these files attachment. As these files are now supported on Google Docs Viewer, there is no need to download and then open in a separately installed programs as Microsoft Office Tools like Excel or PowerPoint or Adobe Tools like Photoshop. You can view these documents online using Google Docs Viewer from your Gmail Inbox.
Other way of viewing or opening these file formats is that, you can upload the files on Google Docs and then view the same as well. For locally stored files, if you don’t want to send those to your Gmail mailbox, then you can upload the files on Google Docs where you get 1 GB of free storage. Once the upload will complete, you can view those files easily on Google Docs Viewer.
I got an email attachment having PSD file. Just clicked on the “View” button below the document to open the Adobe Photoshop file in Google Docs Viewer. It worked awesome and Google Docs Viewer opened the file as normal as Doc or Excel file. Similarly you can open files like PowerPoint, Excel (XLS, XLSX) and other files specified in this post.
Cloud Computing is having a really good future specially for online documentation and storage and hope to get better options from competitors like Zoho, Windows Live and others in future.