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Search giant Google has launched a limited PDF files (Portable Document Format) support in its office suite Google Docs. People can now upload, preview and share PDF documents in Google Docs, though you still can’t edit them yet you can copy the text and paste it.

According to their official blog:

I’m very pleased to confirm that you can now upload, preview and share PDFs in Google Docs. (While you can’t edit them yet, you can copy & paste text.) We eagerly await your feedback on this highly requested feature.

PDF which was created by Adobe Systems initially, is now considered as a standard format. Still in the beta testing, it competes with Microsoft Office but it has yet to improve feature support. As it is Web based, new features can be embedded easily. The search is great as it doesn’t remove the PDF file contents when anything is searched in a file.

While selecting text, instead of usual cursor, an unusual box appears which helps you a lot in selection that means you don’t have to select each and every word from top to bottom, you just have to put it at the start and drag it till the last word, all the words will automatically be selected (now that is cool).

Using the application you can do a lot of things like export other files to PDF, easily zoom in or out the application, hide  the mini document page view through which you can scroll quickly through the document, etc.

There are certain limitations as well like you can upload HTML files, plain text (.txt), Microsoft Word (.doc), Rich Text (.rtf), OpenDocument Text (.odt) and StarOffice (.sxw) files upto 500 KB only. Presentations (which contains Microsoft PowerPoint .ppt and .pps) upto 10 MB from computer and 2 MB from Web and 500 KB via E-mail can be uploaded. Spreadsheets containing Comma Separated Value (.csv), Microsoft Excel (.xls) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) files can be uploaded upto 1 MB.

The new application with its limited features is working fine but they need to make a lot of improvements like increasing file size, adding more file formats, editing options, etc. The thing which I liked the most is the quality of application. Google is certainly taking time to improve their office suite, but whatever they are producing is of high quality. Overall I’ve found the application good and I hope to see improvements in the near future.