How to open files from the Internet directly in Windows applications

Posted on April 8, 2008 at 5:35 am

Have you ever found an image, text file, or web page on the Internet that you wanted to open and edit in your local Photoshop, Word, or Dreamweaver respectively? There are many times when we find data on the Internet stored on external web sites that we need to download and manipulate locally.

Normally, one would simply right-click on an image or file and save it to the local computer. Then you would start up Photoshop or whatever the corresponding application might be and do a File then Open.

That’s fine, but recently I learned about a much better way to download files from the Internet and open it in my desktop application directly. Basically, it involves skipping the step where you have to manually download the file. In some instances, like at my office, some users are not allowed to download files to their local computers, so this direct method can kind circumvent that restriction.

First, open the program that will be used to edit the file stored on the Internet, and click on File -> Open. In the File Name box on the Open Dialog, go ahead and paste in the Internet address (URL) for the file.

For example, if I open Microsoft Word 2007, I can type in http://www.google.com and Word will download and render the page exactly and allows you to now edit the webpage like a WYSIWYG editor.

You can also use the same technique for Excel, Powerpoint, Adobe Photoshop, and other applications. You can open any file you like as long as you have a program that will open it.

Another neat use of this trick is to view the source code for any web page by using Notepad or Wordpad to open the page. By default, Word will try to render the web site for you, but if you just want to view the source code, type in http://www.google.com into the open box for Notepad or Word and you get the following result:

You can also use this technique to automatically open MP3 files stored on the Internet in a sound editing program like Audacity, etc. Finally, you can also open files that are stored on FTP servers the same way, but with a slightly different syntax. It would need to look something like this:

ftp://user:password@ftpserver/foldername/filename.extension

So next time you find something on the Internet that you want to download and edit on your computer, just copy and paste the URL into your application and see if it lets you open it directly! Enjoy! Source: Digital Inspiration

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