How do you read the contents of a PDF document or a PowerPoint Presentation if you don’t have the corresponding viewer installed on your computer or mobile phone? The immediate answer would be that you upload the file to a document hosting site like Scribd or SlideShare and read the contents inside the web browser.

Perfect but there’s a small problem. Most of these sites render documents using Flash and therefore the approach may not work on a mobile phone like the BlackBerry or an iPhone as they don’t support Adobe Flash.

If you are looking for alternative to Flash Paper, Google has released something new that might interest you. Called Google Docs Viewer, this is a web based service where you specify the URL of any PDF or PPT file and the viewer will let you read the contents of that document in any browser (desktop or mobile) as long as it supports JavaScript.

The Google Docs Viewer is also handy for web publishers as, instead of directly linking to PPT or PDF files, they can now link to the documents using Google Docs and site visitors are saved from the hassle of downloading the full document before reading on their computers.

Embed Documents Without Flash

If you like to embed a PowerPoint slideshow or PDF in your blog using Google Docs Viewer, just add “&embedded=true”  to the URL.

For instance, if the your document is located at http://abc.com/file.ppt, you can embed the file in any web page using the following code:

<iframe
  src="http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://abc.com/file.ppt&embedded=true"
  width="500"
  height="250"
  style="border-style:none;"
></iframe>