When you find common document files on the Web you must usually download and open them in separate applications. You can open PDF documents with Google Chrome, but not other formats such as docs, xls, otf, etc. However, with the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer extension we can open those document formats, and others, in the browser.

Head over to the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer page here, and click the + Free option to add it to Google Chrome. Then enter chrome://extensions/ in the address bar to open the extensions page. Scroll down to the Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google) 3.10 extension and click Options to open the page in the shot below.

That shows the file formats that you can now open in Google Chrome. Most of the file formats are already selected by default, but there are a few that are not. Now you can select additional file formats by clicking the empty check boxes and pressing the Save button. Then restart the Google Chrome browser.

Find a file to open in Google Chrome. Enter ‘The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution’ in the Google search box. Then click the The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution doc at the top of the Google search page to open the document. The document opens within Google Chrome as below.

On the left of the window are page thumbnails that you can select to open. Press the magnifying glass buttons at the top of the page to zoom in and out. To find a specific page, click on the search box at the top right of the window and enter a keyword there.

So now you can open a variety of document formats directly in Chrome with Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer. It will certainly come in handy if you don’t have suitable application packages to open the documents with. The extension offers effective rendering even for those documents with more extensive formatting.