Gmail And Google Docs Add A Dozen New Document Types You Can View Online

What do you do when you get a Photoshop file, a PowerPoint 2007 presentation or an Adobe PostScript document and you lack the proper app to open it? Grimace, usually — until you realise that Gmail, via Google Docs, can now open a dozen new files that you might lack (or decidedly don’t want) the proper app for.

For those trying to do more work in just their browser, or anyone needing to look at image files or newer Microsoft Office documents, this particular set of file types is a godsend. Hit the “View” link in Gmail, or upload them to Google Docs, and you can view any of the following:

• Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
• Apple Pages (.PAGES)
• Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
• Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
• Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
• PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
• TrueType (.TTF)
• XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Hopefully the browser extensions and bookmarklets that already make PDFs and PowerPoint files less of a pain, like this Chrome extension, will soon update to give us access to all the new files one can glimpse at with clicking “Save as” or “Open with”.

12 new file formats in the Google Docs Viewer [Docs Blog]