Somehow I missed Google’s announcement last Friday that the Google Docs viewer now supports all Microsoft Office file types. The viewer also supports Apple’s Pages files. If you have files in any of those formats you can now upload them to your Google Docs account and view them from any computer. Most importantly, if someone sends you one of these file types as an attachment to your Gmail account, you can view the file without having to download it.

Applications for Education
If you work in a school environment in which your students and colleagues use a variety of word processing services the support for multiple file types in Google Docs could make managing the files sent to you a whole lot easier. Rather than trying to save files into multiple folders or trying to convert the files before saving, you can just read them in Google Docs.