Google Drive turns into a Universal File Viewer

Designers, for both web and print media, rely on tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for doing the creatives of a project. They’ll do the prototypes in PSD format but, for approval, the designs are often delivered as PDFs since their clients may not have Photoshop or other graphics software that is required to view native PSD files.

PSD file viewer Read Photoshop (PSD), Fonts (TTF) and other files in the browser.

That said, if you have any Photoshop (PSD) files on your desktop that you want to view but without having to install Photoshop, here’s a tip for you – just go to your drive.google.com and upload the file.

Google has recently added support for new file formats in Google Drive that are commonly used to exchange design prototypes between clients and designers. That means you can open and quickly open Photoshop, Illustrator, Font Files (ttf), AutoCAD (DXF) drawings and other popular file formats in the browser itself without requiring the application.

Open Web Files with Google Docs File Viewer

If a file that you are trying to open is already on the web, you you can view it in your browser without having to download and upload it your Google Drive account. Here’s how:

Let the file URL be here:

https://www.labnol.org/files/cool-websites.pdf

Copy the  public URL of that file and pass it to Google’s online viewer at docs.google.com/viewer. So the new URL will be:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https://www.labnol.org/files/cool-websites.pdf

Click this link and you’ll be able to view the online file inside the Google Docs file viewer. This works for PDFs, Adobe files, AutoCAD drawing, Microsoft Office, XML and all other popular file formats.

Also read: Google Docs Guide [Do Everything with Google Docs]

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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