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I noticed that Google Docs Viewer could not open (the progress bar halts) some of my .DOC files that were over 12 MB while some documents which were in about 5MB opened fine. Is there a file size limit for documents that the Viewer can open?

On a related note, is there a way to see the file size in the file listing on the opening screen itself? If that was the case, I would rather not open very large files with Google Docs Viewer.

Update 25-Nov-19: I'm happy to inform that With Chrome v78 on Windows 10, I was able to view a 35MB PDF & a 72MB MP4 file through the native viewer. However it could not open a 327MB PDF (the largest I had) and strangely some other smaller MP4 files I had in Google Drive. Based on Rubén's observation that he could open a 94 MB pdf file, the current maximum size limit of PDF files that can be opened natively is somewhere between 90MB & 327MB. I'll keep testing to find the exact number.

The file sizes are now shown in the Google Drive interface

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    Unfortunately, this appears to still be a problem.
    – Dave Williams
    Mar 8, 2018 at 16:41

4 Answers 4

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File limits are listed here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37603

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    Thanks but this is not what I'm looking for. When you upload documents (PDFs or .DOCs) & try to view them within Google Docs, they will open if the files are of a few MBs. In my case, I wasn't able to view a 12 MB Word .doc file. I see the progress bar as it tries to fetch the document but the activity stops after a few minutes without even displaying any message. It appears that the Viewer cannot handle documents beyond a particular file size. So my question is, what is the maximum size of files that Google Docs Viewer can process?
    – mvark
    Oct 12, 2010 at 15:35
  • The referred help article doesn't mention the Google Drive viewer limits.
    – Rubén ♦
    Mar 9, 2018 at 14:36
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There are no limits for displaying PDF/DOCs using gviewer as far as know. I tested with up to 50MB and it was working.

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    I have been logging results upon opening bulky files. A 27MB PDF could not be opened - it shows a message "No preview available" & a download link is available for that file. My guess is, any PDF with size > 25MB cannot be viewed within Docs Viewer. When attempting to view a 39MB .doc file, I got the warning "Sorry, we are unable to scan this file for viruses. The file exceeds the maximum size that we scan. Download anyway". I've noticed that .DOC files with size > 10MB can be viewed in Chrome but may not show up in Firefox.
    – mvark
    Jun 14, 2011 at 18:39
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This is similar to another answer that is almost 7 years old.

I have being using Google Drive file viewer from a while to view large PDF files, at this time I tried to open a 94 MB pdf file using Windows 10 and Chrome 64 (64 bits) and it works fine for me.

If there was a problem on Google's side it's very likely it was solved long time ago (this question is almost 8 years old) and those who have problems perhaps they are related to their environment rather than to Google Drive file viewer.

It's worth to note that View & open files doesn't mention a file size limit.

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So this problem came up today. I wanted to post a 267MB PDF file for people to view and google drive gave me the error "THIS FILE IS TOO LARGE TO PREVIEW." It suggested some third party viewers. I did some research and could not get a good answer. So I re-created my PDF file in pieces and looked at the file size for what would preview and not preview. I found that there is a 100MB limit for sure (at least for PDF files).

CHROME: Version 86.0.4240.111 (Official Build) (64-bit) for me:

PVIEW PC GOOGLE

NO 267MB ---
NO 106MB 104MB
YES 102MB 99MB

YES 82MB 80MB
YES 76MB 75MB
YES 58M 57MB
YES 32MB 32MB

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