The company has added a one-click preview for the world’s most common file format, Microsoft Word documents.  In a statement on the GMail blog they said…

If you receive Microsoft® Word files as attachments in Gmail, you can now view them with a single click — no need to download, save, and open files with a desktop application when you just want read them. The Google Docs viewer that allows you to view .pdf, .ppt, and .tiff files in your browser now supports .doc and .docx formats too.

Just click the “View” link at the bottom of a Gmail message and the viewer will take it from there. If you decide you want to edit the file, clicking “Edit online” will open it in Google Docs, or you can download it to your desktop from there.

Clearly here though the reason for this is a push to remind people about the company’s own Docs service, their cloud office ‘suite’ after the recent launch of Microsoft Office Live, the new free on-line version of Microsoft Office 2010 featuring the ribbon.

Whatever their commercial reasons for doing this, it’s going to be a good move for consumers as anything that makes users lives easier will always be a good move.  However is there a potential security risk with this new one-click viewer.

Word documents, lets not forget, are also a favourite for virus writers to hide their malicious code in.  Having the user being able to open the file in the browser could be a god-send for them, potentially being able to expose a user to a virus without their PC’s anti-virus software seeing it.

Which brings me back to how do you want to preview and open your files.  Is this new feature excellent and a real time saver, or is it a huge security risk waiting to happen.  I for one will continue to download all attachments and virus scan them before opening them.

I had some problems in the past when I saved documents in Word 2007 in docx format only to get cries for help of users who could not open the document because they were using a previous version of Word. I had the option to explain to them how they could open it (convert online or download the compatibility pack) or convert it to doc and send it to them again.

This happened several times and I finally decided to look for an option to change the default save format in Word. The article at Technix Update reminded me of that and I thought it would be nice to post the quick tutorial as well.

All that needs to be done is to open Word 2007. Once open a click on the Office icon on top and a selection of Word Options loads the menu where the default format can be changed. Just select Save in the left pane and pick Word 97-2003 Documents instead of the default Word Document.

A document that is simply saved will from now on have the file extension doc and not docx. I have not checked but I assume similar options are available for Excel and Powerpoint.

The document formats however add some functionality that youtube is not able to include at the current time. It is possible to search documents for phrases which is only working if the document has not been scanned of course. One of the nicest features of Scribd is however that you can download mp3 files of the texts or listen to a slightly robotic sounding voice that reads the complete document to you. All documents can be embedded in websites

Interaction is important for sites like Scribd and they have been doing a great job to act possibilities. Users can vote for articles and leave comments. Similar documents are shown in a sidebar and every document is tagged to find even more documents that are classified in a similar manner.

I like Scribd a lot. They seem to have a problem with copyrights though. A quick search for php for instance revealed Php for Dummies for instance that should never appear on Scribd. Users do upload mag scans as well, I was able to read the latest Macworld online because a user uploaded it to Scribd.