I always like to use program that can do everything rather than installing two or more separate programs that does the same thing just because they used different type of technology with the same function. For example, you can’t use WinZip v10 to open RAR files. They had to wait till version 11 to support reading RAR and BZ2 files. That’s why I chose PowerArchiver.

Back to the story… Viewing files can be a pain since there are SO MANY types of extensions and softwares available. What if you can view all types of images, text, media, internet files and RTF files by using only ONE program?

Universal Viewer (ATViewer) is an advanced file viewer with wide range of formats supported. Implemented view modes and corresponding file formats are:

    * Text/Binary/Hex/Unicode: all files, with unlimited file size (even 4Gb+ sizes are allowed);
    * RTF/UTF-8: RTF and UTF-8 encoded texts;
    * Image: all general graphics formats: BMP JPG GIF PNG TGA TIFF etc;
    * Multimedia: all formats supported by MS Window Media Player: AVI MPG WMV MP3 MIDI etc;
    * Internet: all formats supported by MS Internet Explorer: HTML XML DOC XLS etc;
    * Plugins: all formats supported by Total Commander Lister plugins.


The Viewer is fully Unicode compatible and can be integrated into Windows Explorer’s context menu, so there is no problem to call it from anywhere in Explorer: right-click on a file and select “Universal Viewer” item. It can also be integrated into file managers that can pass to Viewer filenames via the command-line: in this case filename should be passed as first command parameter.

Some files can’t be read if you don’t install the main program. For example, you’ll need to install Microsoft Word to read .doc files. I know it doesn’t make sense to have Microsoft Word installed but not using it to read .doc files. That’s why there is something called “Lister plugins” which you can use load it to Universal Viewer and it will then support reading the respective extensions.

It’s free, open source and only 750KB in size. Might be useful to you if you’re like me who constantly need to handle many types of files.

[ Download Universal Viewer (ATViewer) ]

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