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. <a href="MyWordDocument.doc">My Word Document</a>, 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:

<?php
header('Content-disposition: inline');
header('Content-type: application/msword'); // not sure if this is the correct MIME type
readfile('MyWordDocument.doc');
exit;

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).