PowerPoint and TIFF file viewing
April 23rd, 2009 | Published in Gmail (Google Mail)
A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.
We've had a "View as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we've integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.
This viewer provides a richer set of features than the old "View as slideshow" version: you can zoom in and out, select text to copy and paste, and "print" the presentation to a PDF document. And, unlike the old version, we no longer require you to have a Flash plugin installed on your browser.
I don't know about you, but the TIFF files I receive are almost always multiple-page faxes -- and the default TIFF viewer on my computer only shows me the first page. It's quite frustrating. On the other hand, our online viewer, powered by Google Docs, will show you every page and give you the option to "print" the TIFF by opening it as a ready-to-print PDF.