Edge is only getting better. After the failure of Internet Explorer, and the classic Edge, Microsoft wants to never make the mistakes of the past with its new browser. Therefore, he is working very hard to make it as complete a tool as possible. And not only as a browser, but also as a multipurpose tool within Windows thanks to which we can, for example, open PDF documents or, as we will soon be able to do, open Office documents without installing anything else.
Office Viewer: Open DOCX or XLSX in Edge
The “Canary” version of Edge (the most advanced version in development, although unstable) has come with a very interesting novelty thanks to which you can forget about installing Office on your computer: Office Viewer . Similar to the PDF viewer in the main web browsers, this function is designed to allow us to open all kinds of documents created with Office directly from the browser.
Whether they are saved on the computer, as attachments in an email or on a website, Edge will allow us to open all kinds of documents, spreadsheets and presentations without having to download them to the computer. Same as PDF. In addition to opening the document from the browser, it will also allow us to download it (if we have opened it from a website), print it or save a PDF version of it. Of course, it will also allow us to save them to OneDrive.
This feature is still under development , and is only available to a very small group of users who use Edge, not even as a flag. Therefore, we think that it will still take a long time to see this feature in the stable version.
What if I want to write a new document?
The Office Viewer function is intended only to be able to open documents already created without having to install the suite on the computer. However, if we have to create a document from scratch, things change, since in that case we will need to depend on Word, Excel and other Office programs. However, it is not mandatory to pay for them.
Office Online is the Microsoft cloud suite that will allow us to use the main programs of the suite from the browser. We can access an online Word, an Excel in the cloud and other company programs, and all this completely free of charge, just using a Microsoft Account. It is true that these programs are somewhat more limited in functions than desktop programs, but for more than 95% of cases their functions are more than sufficient. In addition, little by little there are less and less differences with desktop programs.
And if Office Online does not convince us, we can always turn to its main rival: Google Drive . A pioneer in the office suites in the cloud, Google Drive gives us a word processor, a spreadsheet program and a slide software so that we can forget about the Microsoft suite. And, if we need the document to be in Office format, we can download it in it.
