How to Add a Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Viewer to an Android App

Adding a seamless Word, Excel, and PowerPoint document viewer to Android apps is easy with the PDFTron PDF SDK. No need for a server, Microsoft Office license, or other third party software.

With PDFTron’s dependency-free Office-to-PDF conversion, Office files are converted directly to PDF in the client , and then displayed with a PDF viewer. Conversions are accurate and fast, and can be streamed so that users can see and interact with the document while it’s being converted, providing a fast user experience. If you are interested in trying this out for yourself you can download our free trial .

Although this tutorial will explain how to display Office files in Android (Java and Kotlin ), this capability is available on all major platforms through a single unified API, including iOS Office viewer and Xamarin Office viewer .

Streaming Conversion For Fast Time To Interactive

For the best user experience, you can stream conversion so that the user sees the first few pages almost instantly, and is able to interact with the viewer while the rest of the document is being converted.

Here’s how to stream and display a local .doc, .docx, .pptx and .xlsx file:

public
 void
 streamNonPDFUri
(
Context
 context,
 @NonNull
 Uri
 inUri)
 {
    DocumentActivity
.
openDocument
(
context,
 inUri)
;
}

And that’s it! You can read more about the DocumentActivity class in our documentation.

Here’s what it looks like:

Converting to PDF Independently of Viewing

Office files can also be converted directly to PDF separately from viewing, which may be useful if you want to do batch conversions. Here’s how to do that:

public
 void
 convertOfficeUri
(
@NonNull
 Uri
 inUri,
 @NonNull
 String
 outPath,
 ConversionOptions
 options)
 throws
 PDFNetException
,
 FileNotFoundException
 {
    PDFDoc
 pdfDoc =
 new
 PDFDoc
(
)
;
    if
 (
ContentResolver
.
SCHEME_CONTENT.
equals
(
inUri.
getScheme
(
)
)
)
 {
        SecondaryFileFilter
 fileFilter =
 new
 SecondaryFileFilter
(
getContext
(
)
,
 inUri)
;
        Convert
.
officeToPdf
(
pdfDoc,
 fileFilter,
 options)
;
    }
 else
 {
        String
 inPath =
 inUri.
getPath
(
)
;
        Convert
.
officeToPdf
(
pdfDoc,
 inPath,
 options)
;
    }
    pdfDoc.
save
(
outPath,
 SDFDoc
.
SaveMode.
REMOVE_UNUSED,
 null
)
;
}

You can now display the file saved in outPath like this:

 
private
 void
 openLocalDocument
(
Context
 context,
 String
 localFilePath)
 {
    final
 Uri
 localFile =
 Uri
.
fromFile
(
new
 File
(
localFilePath)
)
;
    DocumentActivity
.
openDocument
(
context,
 localFile)
;
}

Converting Other File Formats

PDFTron SDK can also convert a variety of other file formats to PDF for viewing, such as images (.jpeg, .jpg, .gif, .png, .bmp etc.), markdown (.md) or comic book archive (.cbz). Here’s how:

public
 void
 convertNonPDFUri
(
@NonNull
 Uri
 inUri,
 @NonNull
 String
 outPath,
 ConversionOptions
 options)
 throws
 PDFNetException
,
 FileNotFoundException
 {
    DocumentConversion
 documentConversion;
    if
 (
ContentResolver
.
SCHEME_CONTENT.
equals
(
inUri.
getScheme
(
)
)
)
 {
        SecondaryFileFilter
 fileFilter =
 new
 SecondaryFileFilter
(
getContext
(
)
,
 inUri)
;
        documentConversion =
 Convert
.
streamingPdfConversion
(
fileFilter,
 options)
;
    }
 else
 {
        String
 inPath =
 inUri.
getPath
(
)
;
        documentConversion =
 Convert
.
streamingPdfConversion
(
inPath,
 options)
;
    }
    documentConversion.
convert
(
)
;
    PDFDoc
 pdfDoc =
 documentConversion.
getDoc
(
)
;
    pdfDoc.
save
(
outPath,
 SDFDoc
.
SaveMode.
REMOVE_UNUSED,
 null
)
;
}

These converted files can now be viewed in the same way as the PDF.

Adding More Functionality

For a richer document experience, PDFTron’s Android PDF library makes it easy to add more functionality to the viewer:

Conclusion

Building an Office document viewer in Android is straightforward with the PDFTron SDK. To give it a try, download a trial and check out our documentation .

For further guidance, please get in touch . The developers who helped build our SDK from the ground up would be happy to walk you through your options.

ChungKhoanAZ