Want a quick and easy way to view documents in your browser without having to download them to your computer? Just want to preview some .ppt slides but don’t have PowerPoint installed?

Here’s how.

A scenario

Let’s say you are just casually doing some googling, and you come across a file you want to preview. But my oh my, it’s a .ppt file! What in the world are you going to do with that? You don’t have PowerPoint installed, and even if you do, you don’t want to download the file to your computer just to preview it.

Here’s a link to a powerpoint slide on information retrieval I’ve found:

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs276/handouts/lecture14-learning-ranking.ppt

If you try clicking on the link, you’ll be prompted to download the file, which is what we’re trying to avoid.

The solution

It’s a simple tweak. Just add https://docs.google.com/viewer?url= in front of the link to whatever file you want to preview, and you’re good to go!

For our information retrieval slide example, the link would be:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs276/handouts/lecture14-learning-ranking.ppt

Try clicking on the link above. You can now preview the file in your browser without downloading it!

Isn’t that neat?

Hope this helps save you some time and clutter. Happy browsing!