Google just announced a small but handy new feature for Gmail: one-click previews for Microsoft Word documents. This new features works for .doc and the more recent .docx format. Until now, Gmail’s one-click preview feature only supported PDF files, PowerPoint documents and images in the TIFF format. The new preview feature for Word documents replaces the “view as HTML” option in Gmail.

Now, this is useful for anyone, but particularly those of us who spend a large portion of our days working with words and sharing words with others. One more step toward complete abandonment of the corporate Microsoft Exchange jail. It’s a good example of an added feature that seems so obvious you wonder why no one has done it before. Thank you, Google.