word document viewer browser plugin

Question

Is there a browser plugin or an extension that allows the user to view .doc files in browser?

I need to embed in my application, a document viewer. So far, I tried using services like google docs, but this solution doesn't work for our application, because of some security problems.

Answer 1

Do you know about the Office Web Apps? Microsoft developed something similar to Google Docs and you can use the Word Web Application to view Word files. It will pretty much display anything - a lot of editing functions from the offline version are not available though.

If you are just looking for a viewer search for "Word ActiveX Viewer" and you will find plenty (commercial) viewers.

Answer 2

I thought Internet Explorer + Microsoft Office used to do this by default?

I can for sure tell you that other than converting the doc to html you won't get a cross-browser, cross-platform solution. Since you are saying it's for viewing only, that would seem like the way to go.

Answer 3

To have IE open the .doc within the browser and not in a separate winword.exe, you need to define the association at client end.

As .doc file is an external resource to HTML, it would download the file into its temp, and then attempt to launch it. It would launch it using the default program that it is associated with.

To control this behavior, please have a look at:

http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/sharing/opendocinie.html