I recently formatted my whole hard drive and reinstalled Ubuntu to dual boot with Vista and when I started to work I noticed that I needed to open an Excel file urgently. I wasn’t at home, so I didn’t have my Office CD, nor did I have time to download Open Office (at that time Ubuntu was not yet installed). I needed to find a quick way to take a peek at that Excel file, and here’s what I did.

All you really need is your Gmail account, just create a draft and attach the file in question. Once you save the draft you can download the attachment or choose to view it online. It won’t give you the beauty of Excel 2007, but it will let you see all the data you need quickly and without the need to install anything.