April 02, 2007

Viewing Powerpoint on the Web

Living as a I do now a) on a Mac, and b) usually online, I get fed up when people send me MS Office docs that I don't necessarily have viewers for or links to docs that I have to download and open...

...because being an untidy sort, my desktop and download areas - like my mailbox - are frequently cluttered with docs that I've downloaded so that I could use a desktop app to open and view them...

So henceforth I've giving up a little bit more of my life to an online solution: Zoho Quickread.

zohoOpen.png

This browser plugin lets you open most office docs that are linked to from a public web page in the appropriate (online) Zoho app. No account necessary - I think?

Google do something similar, of course, with .doc docs in GMail, but Zoho is the more complete solution... at the moment...

[UPDATE 12/7/07 - As well as opening .doc and .xls attachments in GMail, GMail now also opens powerpoint .ppt presentation files, a precursor announcement to the imminent gPresenter app, I suspect..?]

There are bound to be issues, of course - like Zoho only being able to display public files (and not ones that require authentication to view them); and maybe some copyright issues - I'm not sure if Zoho maintain a copy of files you view, for example (or whether you can import them directly into your Zoho account).

In fact - the Zoho toolbar doesn't really solve the problem of opening emailed document attachments at all (whereas the Google solution does)...

...but it's a start...and it means I'll probably end up viewing more online presentations (that aren't slideshared) than I currently do...

PS hmm - I wonder - Zoho have pretty effective APIs for all their apps; and Yahoo just opened up their Yahoo mail API... I wonder???

Posted by ajh59 at April 2, 2007 05:28 PM
Comments

I've been waiting for something like this for google docs & spreadsheets; at least now in gmail you can choose to open .doc's and .xls's in google. But it would be great to have an always-on right-click and send to option. I'd go with Zoho if I weren't so heavily invested in gmail...

BTW, you know you can't post a comment from your permalink url's?

Posted by: todd at April 3, 2007 01:44 AM