Chrome Office Experience

Google has released a chrome-based plug-in that allows users using the Chrome 27 beta and the latest dev version to read word,excel and PPT documents directly in their browsers. This latest plugin, called the chrome Office Viewer, has been part of the Chrome OS and can now be enabled on a regular PC. With this plugin, either on OS X or on Windows, you can open online or local Office documents just as you would with Chrome OS. But now, it only supports read-only mode. So in use, it's very much like the Chrome built-in PDF feature, with toolbar buttons that support zooming, printing, and saving.

This plugin is very large and requires downloading several MB of installation files. It contains a Google Native client that provides a sandbox protection for native code to run. It can be run offline, that is to say, you do not need to request prior requests such as Microsoft Office Web Apps Service (this is Microsoft's available version of Office Online, below) or Google's Drive and docs online service before displaying the file.

Of course, at present this plug-in is still in beta testing phase, some functions relatively simple and rough, the use of the process there are many problems. We tried to use it to open a very representative and very simple Word document, found a lot of obvious errors, such as headers, footers missing, line number is wrong, font is wrong, some border and shadow settings can not be reflected.

A document opened in Microsoft Word, note the Sans-serif font that it uses, and a list of headers, footers, and two fully independent numbered numbers.