HOW TO display Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents within the browser

If a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document (.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx formats) hosted on the web is accessed through a browser, it typically asks if you want to open or save the file. You can then view it if you have MS Office or the corresponding Word/Excel/PowerPoint Viewer (freely downloadable) installed.

To increase the reach of the content in those Office documents among non-PC/Mac users, you can use Google Docs Viewer to embed them within a web page. Google Docs Viewer now supports 12 new file formats including Excel & Powerpoint.

You can generate the HTML tag for the embedded viewer that you can paste into your own web page from the home page of Google Docs Viewer. You can alternatively use the example below to append the URL of the Office document to the url querystring of the service -

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fviewer%3Furl%3
Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flabs.google.com%252Fpapers%252F
bigtable-osdi06.pdf&embedded=true" style="border: none;" 
height="780" width="600">
</iframe>


You can also tweak the dimensions of the embedded Viewer within the browser.

Embedded Viewer displaying an online PowerPoint file within a webpage

Also see:  Office Apps Online Viewer can display web hosted Office documents as a web page