How can I view/open a word document in my browser using with PHP or HTML

Question

How can I open and view a .doc file extension in my browser? The file is located on my server.

Answer 1

Two options: First is to just link to it, e.g. My Word Document, the second is to use an iframe and point it to the document. For this to work, however, most browsers require that the server sends a Content-disposition: inline header with the document. If you cannot configure your web server to do this, you can wrap the document in a bit of php:

And then link to that script instead of your word document.

This isn't guaranteed to work though; the content-disposition header is just a hint, and any browser may choose to treat it as an attachment anyway.

Also, note that .doc isn't exactly portable; basically, you need Word to display it properly (Open Office and a few other Open Source applications do kind of a decent job, but they're not quite there yet), and the browser must support opening Word as a plugin.

If the .doc file format requirement isn't set in stone, PDF would be a better choice (the conversion is usually as simple as printing it on a PDF printer, say, CutePDF, from inside Word), or maybe you can even convert the document to HTML (mileage may vary though).