Universal Viewer is another application that will suite many more needs. It has not only been designed to open document formats but also other formats like images and photos, multimedia files like videos or audio and Internet files like htm or xml. The program is driven by plugins that add support for various file types. The plugins are the same that are used by Total Commander which ensures the availability of many plugins for various file formats.

Universal Viewer is a viewer that displays the information in a basic but highly accessible fashion. Only the main information are shown without additional formatting. Take a look at a comparison between the same document in Microsoft Word 2007 and Universal Viewer:

Universal Viewer is therefor a basic viewer that can display pretty much any format that can be displayed visually. It comes with the following feature set:

• Full support for Unicode filenames
• Built-in functions of several popular plugins: images, multimedia, webpages view
• Support for multiple codepages: ANSI, OEM, EBCDIC, ISO, KOI8, Mac etc.
• Toolbar, status bar, other interface improvements
• Auto-reloading of file on changing, “Follow tail” option
• Displaying of line numbers
• Displaying of non-printable characters
• Combined Unicode/Hex mode (call Unicode mode twice)
• More modern RegEx search library
• Print preview
• EXIF viewer

Some of the more commonly used plugins, for example to display Microsoft Office 2007 documents are linked from the developers homepage directly while others can be found on Total Commander plugin websites which are also linked there. Plugins can be added directly from within Universal Viewer.

Universal Viewer itself can be downloaded as a portable version or installer. The developer offers a Pro version of the viewer as well which adds several new features to the application.

Verdict:

Universal Viewer is a fast and lightweight document viewer that can be used to quickly look at the contents of virtually any files on the computer system.

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TextMaker Viewer 2009 is a free document viewer that supports a wide range of different document formats. It basically combines the supported formats of Microsoft Office 2007 with those of Open Office in a fast loading interface.

Supported are the following formats in the latest version of TextMaker Viewer:

• .docx, .docm Microsoft Word 2007
• .sxw OpenOffice.org/StarOffice Text
• .dotx, .dotm Microsoft Word 2007 templates
• .rtf Rich Text Format
• .doc Microsoft Word 6.0 up to Word 2007
• .psw Pocket Word (Pocket PC)
• .dot Microsoft Word templates 6.0 up to 2007
• .pwd Pocket Word (Handheld PC)
• .tmd TextMaker 6.0 up to 2008
• .htm/html HTML documents
• .odt OpenDocument Text
• .txt Text files (DOS, Windows, Unicode, UTF-8)

The document viewer comes with a few additional features like zooming in or out of the document or viewing it in full screen. Documents can also be printed on the local computer system. A little bit annoying is the “nag” screen at the beginning that can be used to enter registration information. Users have to press skip to continue. It will not appear as long as they keep the document viewer open.

Are you using a specific program to view documents? If so let us know in the comments.

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Now seriously. Have you ever received a document (a clean one) with an extension you never heard of and didn’t even know what application you were supposed to use to open it? That’s not a problem any more due to applications and online services that can understand varied file formats and display the contents of those files for you. Of course, you can’t edit such files with viewers because their only purpose is to display the contents of the document. But hey, better that nothing, ain’t it…

Let me introduce 2 ways of viewing contents of a document with an unknown extension:

1) Install a single program to rule all the document extensions you can ever happen to meet (alright, maybe not absolutely all of them but pretty much most of the common ones). I’ve tried a freeware tool called TextMaker Viewer and it does it’s job well. It’s a simple document viewer without useless functions but it has everything needed to fulfil it’s purpose. It supports 10 of the most common file formats which should be quite enough for average use. According to the coders, Linux version is under development.

2) Don’t install anything while keeping the possibility to view common file types through your browser. Zoho Viewer is an online service that does just that. You can either choose a file from your local computer to be displayed or enter URL of an online document you’d like to read. You can even print the document or obtain a code allowing you to embed it somewhere else on the web. No annoying ads, clean interface, 15 file types supported.

The advantage of the second method is that you do not have to execute the file to view its contents.

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