According to a post on the on Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) Docs Blog, Google recently added support for 12 new file formats into the Google Viewer.

The Viewer is a handy tool that lets you open and view documents such as Office documents in the Google Viewer. From there, you can print, save as a PDF or open a file for editing in Google Docs. Depending on the tool, documents will retain most formatting.

This means regardless of the type of file, if it's supported by the viewer, you can open and use it even when you don't own the associated software package. This can be extremely useful when sharing documents with others because it means that they don't have to necessarily own a copy of Microsoft Office to open up an Office file (even if it's the newer docx format).

The latest update includes Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) Photoshop and Illustrator files and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) Pages (the Apple word processor) documents. It even opens Autodesk AutoCad documents.

The Google Viewer enables you to stay within the browser, regardless of the file type (so long as it's supported). When sharing documents made from expensive desktop software packages, that can be a very powerful function.

For more information:
- see the Google Docs Blog blog post

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