Avoid nasty plugins with this extension, says Google Google's ongoing attempts to harry Microsoft by nipping at the heels of the cash cow that is Office have thrown up some new irritants, and a new definition of "additional software". Chrome Office Viewer is one of the ad giant's new tricks and allows those who use Beta versions of Chrome to open Microsoft Office documents …
I can copy the directory path from Windows Explorer and paste it into Chrome. Then click on the appropriate file in the resultant directory listing. That should save the time taken to load full fat Word.
It already works with .txt and .pdf files (and it's nice how Chrome automatically prepends file:///).
That should save the time taken to load full fat Word.
Dunno about Word, open office opens in around 1.4sec from SSD (i.e. no disk cache) on a 3years old laptop (core duo). So the entire copy-paste human time will take a lot more than just double-click the file.
Not tried Word Viewer (from MS)?
That was my first thought, too. One advantage, I suppose, is that this should provide the same functionality on non-Windows boxes. It might also be a step (or at least a feint) toward offering the ability to edit from within the browser.
Ouch! This should be interesting. MS has been taking its punches lately, and nearly every week on here, there's a new debate about whether MS is losing market share. However, people have been criticising alternatives to Office such as the LO and Open Office suites for their lack of interoperability, arguing that MS will always have Office and its corresponding revenue.
Yeah well, maybe not if Google starts making more shots across the bow... It would take a Google to sink MS in the short term. I'm not sure it addresses the Office Power user with VBA Macros galore. But if Google wants it could tackle that problem too. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.... I bet MS would love to go back to a proprietary file format for Office!
...to stake a pint on the majority of users for the majority of the time being able to get by fine on nothing more sophisticated than .rtf. It's only the constant pushing of 'upgraded' default document formats that result in people creating their documents in formats that are complete overkill for writing a letter/essay, etc. i.e. a bog standard text document with maybe some bold and/or italic styling.
In other words, if push ever comes to shove, the dominance/necessity of .docx could suddenly fade like the morning mist, and become just another specialist format for those who actually need it.
Already millions of words are traded online via email and web pages which never see a 'Word' processor, let alone file format. History show that monopolies are almost always fleeting, however desperately the monopolist tries to sustain their stranglehold.
I'm not about to make any firm predictions, but I do believe it won't actually take very much in practice to end the idea that we somehow 'need' .doc/.docx.
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