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I would like to integrate a viewer tool for viewing files in PDF, MS Excel, and MS Word formats. I am developing a website that store manuals on our server and I would like visitors to be able to view these manuals online instead of downloading. I found a tool named ViewerJS that can view PDF and Open Documents online. However the tool doesn't support Microsoft Office.

  • Must support displaying at least:
    • .pdf
    • .docx
    • .xlsx
  • Prefer Open Source and Gratis
  • Licensed software with price up to $2000USD would possibly work.
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  • Looking good, got a couple questions; Do you care whether it is Open Source? What price range is acceptable? – Nick Dickinson-Wilde Jul 23 '14 at 5:11
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    We prefer Open Source solution. However, we can also consider Licence solution perhaps from few hundreds to couple of thousands USD. Thank much for your edition. Cheers. – paul Jul 23 '14 at 6:52
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Following on from Steve Barnes suggestion, JODReports sits on top of Open Office and Libre Office so can take a fair bit of the leg work out of driving Open Office / Libre Office via the API. The conversions are often surprisingly good, but you'd have to run some tests to determine if that works for your documents well enough.

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  • Thank @jowierun for your information. I will try later because I am doing another project. The question was asked a long time ago. Anyway, that is very interesting to learn about the tool. – paul Nov 27 '14 at 6:24
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You could possibly use LibraOffice in command line convert mode to generate an appropriate view of a lot of such documents. See this for some information.

That would allow your server to provide a view of the documents supported by LibraOffice (which is free) but I would recommend providing a download link as well. Your choice would be whether to convert on view - slower viewing, convert on upload - slower uploads and more storage new documents only, convert on first view and keep converted or batch convert everything.

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  • Thank @SteveBarnes for your information. Maybe we will first use convert on view. If we have more traffic we can use the second option. I never tried LibraOffice for converting, I am not sure if layout of these documents still can be kept. We have around 100GB of manuals. – paul Jul 23 '14 at 7:06
  • Generally it works quite well but you do need to play with the flags sometimes - don't forget the --headless option it is important in this sort of case. – Steve Barnes Jul 23 '14 at 11:44

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