Omnivorous Surfer

I was creating a form in Excel for a friend this morning and wanted to have her take a look to see if she liked its appearance and suggest any changes. I won't be seeing her for a few days, and she is not very comfortable with computers, so sending her an attachment was not going to be the best option. In looking for a way to let her easily view a PDF version, I tried Zoho Viewer. While Zoho is a complete suite of productivity, collaboration, and business applications, I won't attempt to address those in this post. Instead the focus will be on Zoho Viewer.

It really couldn't be easier. All you have to do is browse to select your document, indicate how long you want it to be available from their server (1 day-"do not expire"), and click the view button. From the viewer you have option of saving the file, sharing it (put in an email address and a message, and off it goes), embedding it (code is generated for embedding the document itself or a link), and printing it. From the email or the link, someone who views the document has the same options.

For presentations, text documents, and spreadsheets, you have the additional option of exporting it to any of the supported formats appropriate for that type of file. For the spreadsheet, even the charts exported as editable charts.

File formats supported include MS Office, OpenDocument, and OpenOffice formats as well as pdf, rtf, html, txt, and csv. The Excel example on the site shows that it will display multiple sheets in a workbook. A PowerPoint presentation can be viewed as a slideshow (no animations or transitions) or exported to any of the above-mentioned presentation formats.

I was not successful in obtaining an acceptable view of a document with several images included, probably because of the layout specified for them within Word. This was my only failure. The solution in this case would have been to upload a pdf version of the document.

This is so quick, easy, and clean. To make it even better, there is no registration required! I think this is a great way to share a static document simply for viewing or for downloading, or to share a document via email without having to use an attachment. Nice!