Chances are you don’t have MS Office installed on your PC. Heck, that’s one of the things the people from Redmond got right and even Mac fanboys will admit it. But what if that probability is skewed and you don’t have a reliable MS Office to open the DOC and XLS files for you. Or you have an older version that doesn’t know what a DOCX file is?
Worse yet, what if MS Office crashed (that happened too)? Don’t worry… bookmark this article somewhere close because now we are going to look at some third-party tools that will help you to open and view MS Word and Excel files without a hitch. In some cases, you can also easily edit your document.
Open office
Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle) has provided the handy OpenOffice.org, a free and open source alternative to MS Office. It is a full-featured suite and an MS Office alternative that can hold its own among document editors. OpenOffice is cross-platform and also supports 120 languages. Currently, this suite under the Apache Software Foundation oversees its development. The Writer and Calc modules are word processing and spreadsheet applications, respectively. Both support reading and writing MS Office document formats.
Google Docs
Google Docs is the solution that I would recommend immediately because it’s always in the cloud. You need an internet connection to work and share your documents from anywhere. You can also work on your document without an internet connection, then update it when you turn it on. You can use an online word processor to convert most file types to the Google Docs format.
For viewing Google Docs supports both .DOC and .DOCX formats. You can download them back to your desktop as Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, HTML or zip files.
For spreadsheets, Google Docs can import and convert .xls, .csv, .txt, and .ods formatted data and export it back. For viewing Google Docs supports both .XLS and .XLSX formats. You can use Google Documents Viewer to quickly view online documents.
Microsoft Office Web Apps
Microsoft Office Web Apps is Microsoft Suite in the cloud. This is Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs, and if you have a (free) Windows Live account, you don’t have to go anywhere. Oh, maybe you could visit our Complete Guide to Microsoft Office Web Apps and read about how you can easily use it to edit your documents without breaking a sweat.
If you want to stay online, here’s another online app that won’t bother you if you don’t have MS Office installed:
Zamzar
With the help of Zamzar, you can convert an “unreadable” DOCX or XLSX file to a more user-friendly format like DOC or PDF and then view it. All you need to do is upload the original file. You can also send it as an email attachment or use the site’s bookmarklet.
Then we have a simple plan and viewer:
Word converter and viewer
Check out the full list of Microsoft’s own Word Viewers and Converters (UPDATE: This tool is no longer available) for the job. Anything that worked with MS Office 2007 will also work with version 2010 because the migration to DOCX and XLSX happens from 2007 onwards. You must download the individual tools, but also download and install the compatibility pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint first as needed to view and print Word documents on computers that do not have Word 2007 or Word 2010 installed.
Free Document Viewer
TextMaker Viewer 2010 (and PlanMaker Viewer 2010) are two free document viewers that can help you view and print your MS Word and MS Excel documents. A complete list of files that these two applications can handle is provided on their homepages. It includes DOCX and XLSX formats.
Alternatively, as the website says, you can also distribute these two 4MB apps along with your documents to anyone who doesn’t have MS Office installed. Or better yet, send them the download link.
All of the above tools show that you should have no trouble viewing and printing MS Office files urgently. Do you have any other tools in mind? Let us know.
Categories: How to
Source: thpttranhungdao.edu.vn/en/
