Learn about the Google Drive viewer and its supported file types and keyboard shortcuts.

With Google Drive, you can quickly view many file types online, including PDFs, Microsoft Office

files, and many image file types.

Any file that you upload or sync to Google Drive and don’t convert to a Google Docs format can

be accessed through the Google Drive viewer. To do so, click on the file's title in Google Drive

on the web or by following a link shared with you.

Here are some things you can do from the Google Drive viewer:

Show revision history of the file (if you have owner or edit rights)

Change the sharing settings (if you have owner or edit rights)

Download and print by going to the File menu and selecting Download as...

Search text on the page using the search box in the upper right.

Add your comments in all types of files.

Only files under 25 MB can be previewed with the Google Drive viewer.

Supported file types

Google Drive viewer helps you preview over 16 different file types, listed below:

Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)

Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV)

Text files (.TXT)

Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)

Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)

Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)

Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)

Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)

Apple Pages (.PAGES)

Adobe Illustrator (.AI)

Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)

Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)

Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)

Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)

PostScript (.EPS, .PS)

TrueType (.TTF)

XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)

Google Drive is also connected directly to Gmail. If you receive an attachment in Gmail, you can

click the ‘View’ link, which will display that file attachment through the Google Drive viewer.

Search your uploaded files

You can search for text in PDF and image files by:

Typing a query in the search box in Google Drive on the web.

Opening the Google Drive viewer and using the search box in the upper right.

You'll be able to search the first 100 pages of any text documents or text-based PDFs that

you've uploaded. You'll also be able to search for text found on the first ten pages of any image

PDFs on your Drive.

Keyboard shortcuts for the Google Drive viewer

Action Shortcut

Open Ctrl + O

Download Ctrl + S

Play/Pause Video Space

Compact controls Ctrl + Shift + F

Editdescription Ctrl + Alt + E

Open Ctrl + O