A hospital day is mostly paperwork, not imaging. Discharge summaries, referrals, consent forms, rotas, supplier invoices, protocol handbooks, facilities drawings — and the machine in front of you often has nothing that opens the one you were sent.
OnlineDocumentViewer.com opens that paperwork in a browser tab. Free, no account, nothing to install, and the file is deleted from the server when you close it.
Start here: it does not open DICOM
.dcm and .ima are not accepted on this site. DICOM rendering is a separately licensed plugin of the Doconut SDK, and it is deliberately left out of the free viewers. A study goes to your PACS workstation, not to a browser tab.
What does open is what a radiologist exports from the study: a key image saved as JPEG, PNG or TIFF opens in the image viewer at up to 25 MB, and a multi-page TIFF opens in the TIFF viewer at the same ceiling.
What it does open
| You were sent | Viewer | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Discharge summary, referral, consent form (PDF) | PDF viewer | 25 MB |
| Report or letter (DOC, DOCX, ODT, RTF) | Word viewer | 15 MB |
| Rota, budget, lab export (XLS, XLSX, CSV, ODS) | Excel viewer | 20 MB |
| Teaching deck (PPT, PPTX, ODP) | PowerPoint viewer | 20 MB |
| Exported image (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WEBP) | Image viewer | 25 MB |
| Scanned page set (TIFF, TIF) | TIFF viewer | 25 MB |
| Message with the attachment inside (EML, MSG, EMLX) | Email viewer | 10 MB |
| Protocol handbook (EPUB) | eBook viewer | 25 MB |
| Ward or plant drawing (DWG, DXF, DGN) | CAD viewer | 10 MB |
Seventeen viewers, 70+ extensions between them. Each sets its own ceiling: a drawing and a text file do not cost the same to render.
Search does not read a scan
Search works on a text layer. A PDF generated by a hospital information system has one, so it is searchable. A page that was put through a scanner is a picture of text with no layer underneath, and search returns nothing on it. There is no OCR here — nothing on this site turns a scan into searchable text.
Before you upload patient data
Be plain about this. The file is uploaded to a server we run, rendered there, and deleted afterwards. There is no account and nothing is retained. But:
- We hold no certification. No HIPAA attestation, no ISO 27001, no SOC 2. None.
- The document leaves your network. That is where a HIPAA or GDPR assessment starts, and no property of this viewer answers it for you.
- A hosted viewer is the wrong shape of tool for identifiable patient data. Use it for the drawing, the invoice, the protocol PDF, the deck. For anything with a patient's name on it, the decision belongs to your information governance team, not to a marketing page.
If the requirement is that documents never leave your infrastructure, the Doconut SDK is the same rendering engine licensed to run on your own servers. This website is not that.
How to use it
- Open the viewer page for your format, or drop the file on the home page and it is routed for you.
- Read it — page, zoom, fit to window, print.
- Close the tab. The file goes.
That is the whole workflow. No sign-up, no plan, no upgrade.