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My uni seems incapable of setting a single timetable for a term and sticking to it, so they make several “up-to-date” timetables available on their website which are updated daily. However they insist on keeping these timetables in Word and Excel formats, because that’s what they are made in and everyone has Office, right?

Well I have M$ Office 2008 installed on my iBook G4, and it’s painfully slow to open and it hogs pretty much everything. So I spent a while looking for somekind of plugin for Firefox to open Word and Excel documents inside Firefox, like you can do with IE on Windows.

Only one such plugin exists, Word Browser Plugin not surprisingly opens Word documents in browsers such as Firefox, but not very well - it doesn’t like tables. Since I mainly want to open timetables, this is a problem. Apparently no other plugins exist for this purpose so I gave up and continued to use Office to view the timetables.

However a couple of days ago I stumbled accross Quick Viewer Droplet, an AppleScript by Apple. Quick Look is a part of OS X, that allows you to preview documents from within Finder such as Office documents without opening Office or whatever program is used to open them. This in itself partially solves my problem - I could use Quick Look to open the timetables without need to grind my iBook to a halt by opening Office, but Quick Viewer Droplet cuts out Finder and previews files in Quick Look directly, so that Firefox can be set to automatically preview Word Documents and Excel documents!

Amazing, isn’t it?!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.