Is it possible to use Google Docs Viewer to view files already in Google Docs?

Posted by john2x on Super User See other posts from Super User or by john2x
Published on 2012-02-24T06:39:40Z Indexed on 2012/10/02 9:40 UTC
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The title is a little confusing. I'll elaborate.

As far as I can tell, the Google Docs Viewer tool accepts a link to a raw document file (e.g. .doc, .pdf, et. al.), and renders its contents in the browser. For example, this url to a pdf http://research.google.com/archive/bigtable-osdi06.pdf when passed to Viewer, returns this link: http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.google.com%2Farchive%2Fbigtable-osdi06.pdf

What I'm trying to achieve is, use the Viewer to view a document already hosted in Google Docs (i.e. no longer a raw document file). When passing a link to a Google Docs document to the Viewer, the result is not as expected. It renders the link's HTML source instead of the document's contents.

The reason I want to do this is that I want to be able to use the "embed" feature of Viewer to view Google Docs documents. Does Google Docs have a "link to embeddable view" feature?

P.S. Here is a sample snippet to an embedded document. This is what I want, but pointing to an existing Google Docs document.

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fresearch.google.com%2Farchive%2Fbigtable-osdi06.pdf&embedded=true" width="600" height="780" style="border: none;"></iframe>

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