Legal Research

Use Google Docs Viewer to Quickly View Documents Online Without Leaving your Browser

Google has announced a nice Docs viewer which you can use to quickly view documents online without leaving your browser. PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, and TIFF files are supported

Simply enter a document URL to generate a link to view it. You can then either view the document right away inside of Google Docs, or get the URL which you can then share via email or paste into a website.

To see how a PDF looks inside of Google Docs, follow this link to the WI Budget in Brief which I created with Google Docs Viewer. As a comparison, here is a link to the WI Budget in Brief as you would download it and open separately in the Adobe Acrobat viewer.

I've also noticed that some documents that appear in regular Google search results automatically contain a link to "View" in the Google Docs viewer. Others documents do not, however. Instead, they have a "View as HTML" link. See the screen capture below. I'm not sure why there is a difference. I certainly prefer viewing in the Docs viewer rather than the HTML.

Source: Research Buzz

Full post as published by WisBlawg - From the UW Law Library on September 30, 2009 (boomark / email).