Use Gmail to view Office files online
This weekend
my girlfriend and I were visiting my mom. My girlfriend needed to view a PowerPoint file someone had sent her, but my
mom's really, really old PC doesn't have PowerPoint and, believe it or not, is too old to run the free PowerPoint
viewer. I thought for a moment and then remembered that whenever someone e-mails a document in a common format to my
Gmail account, a handy "View as HTML" link shows up next to the "Download" link. "Forward it
to your Gmail account," I told her, and lo and behold a few seconds later she was able to view the file (albeit
with some funky formatting) right in Firefox.Yesterday the clever folks at Lifehacker printed basically the same tip I gave my girlfriend: If you're traveling and need to read a document but don't have the right app for it, send it to yourself using Gmail. It's a simple idea, but can be a lifesaver, and it works like a charm with PDFs, Office, and OpenOffice.org files.
