For users to quickly access Office files, Microsoft already offers a browser extension for Edge and Chrome browsers. Apart from this, Microsoft is now integrating the “Office Viewer” component into Edge to let you view Spreadsheets, presentations, and documents on the fly directly within the browser without needing to downloading them. The feature is available in Edge 92 Dev and working flawlessly when turned on.
Enable Office Viewer in Microsoft Edge
- Ensure you’re using the Edge Dev 92.0.873.1 or later, Click on Settings and more
- Select Settings
- Click on Downloads
- Toggle “Quickly View office files on the web using Office Viewer” setting to enable.
How to use Office Viewer
Unless you’re using Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook, when you receive an office document attached to an email, you need to download and open it with Office Program installed on your computer.
If you don’t have Office installed, you may look for options available online.
Now, Edge addresses this with the new feature. It lets you open documents on the web.
In our testing, Edge opened all Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint files successfully as if they were opened in Microsoft Office on a computer or online version of Office, with options to download the document and PDF version, save to OneDrive.
To try out the feature, you can visit this link containing a sample of documents.
For every file opened in Edge, it provides an option at the end to “Manage settings”.By using that or by visiting downloads Settings, you can able to disable Office Viewer.
How Office Viewer in Edge is different from Microsoft’s Office web browser extension
As we said above, Edge Office Viewer works for office files present on the web only.
Whereas, Office browser extension opens files saved in OneDrive and OneDrive for Business or on your computer.
Both serve the purpose, users may prefer the tool built into Edge than installing the extension.
So in addition to exiting powerful PDF Viewer, Microsoft Edge is getting Office Viewer to make your life easier in managing PDF and office documents.
What do you say about this? Let us know in the comments below.
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