Q:

Adding microsoft world web app to a website - or previewing documents online.

Hi all you lovely stack peeps... heres hoping you can help me with a small conundrum. 
A web system I am developing needs to provide users with the ability to preview documents. I am looking into ways of generating Jpgs of the first few pages of documents but that may not be possible on our server ATM. 
Facebook seam to have recently gone very microsoft, one of the functions they have added is the preview option to "docs". This seams to use the world web app tool by microsoft. 
I have googled arround and the only way to use this seams to be to embed things from a skydrive account. This won't suit my website (and I think we would break to terms if we tried) so I was wondering if there was some kind of API available. I havn't found one but I was wondering if anyone else had?
Alternatively what is the best solution for previewing Microsoft documents on-line?.. is there a library or tool kit available anywhere for doing this kind of thing? Is there an open office version of the world web app?
Cheers!
Chris

A:

If i understand your question, you try to preview documents like pdf,ppt,doc etc within your web app?
If yes, you can try google docs viewer
You can have an iframe, with its src targeting to the google viewer. So, if your document is this: http://samplepdf.com/sample.pdf you can preview it like:  
<iframe src='https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsamplepdf.com%2Fsample.pdf&embedded=true'width='400'></iframe>​ 
Edit:
Here's a fiddle of how it's working: http://jsfiddle.net/7ueuU/ 
Edit 2: 
Here's a list of supported files: http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1738646

