Nightdocs

Read Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in VS Code, in your dark theme.

Nightdocs is a lightweight, view-only viewer for .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files. Documents take on your editor's colors so a white page doesn't light up a dark room, and when you need to edit, one click opens the file in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Status: preview. Feedback is very welcome.

Why Nightdocs

• Dark-first. Pages, text, tables and fills are remapped to your theme. Colors keep their hue and text keeps readable contrast. Pictures keep their colors and are only dimmed. One click on ◐ shows the original colors.
• Fast and view-only. Files open in about a second, and sheets with 100,000 rows scroll smoothly. Nothing can be changed by accident.
• Edit in Office when you need to. Open in Word, Open in Excel or Open in PowerPoint hands the file to its desktop app. The view refreshes when the file is saved.
• Private. No telemetry and no network access. Your files never leave your machine.

Features

Word (.docx)

• Page layout with headers, footers, footnotes, tables, lists, images and links
• Documents that Word never paginated (exports from other apps, generated files) are split into pages
• Find with Ctrl+F

Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm)

• Cell styles, number formats, and dates in your locale's short format
• Merged cells, frozen panes, hidden rows, columns and sheets, and row and column fills
• Text spills into empty neighbors the way it's aligned, including center across selection
• Conditional formatting: highlight rules, color scales and data bars
• Pictures and text boxes; charts appear as placeholders with their title
• Select cells with the mouse or keyboard, copy them, and see Sum, Count and Average
• Find across the whole sheet, not only the visible cells

PowerPoint (.pptx, .pptm, .ppsx)

• Slides with text, bullets, tables, shapes, pictures, SmartArt and charts
• Charts follow your theme too: text and gridlines adapt, data keeps its colors
• Slides designed dark, or drawn on a picture, keep their look
• Hidden slides are shown dimmed and marked
• The status bar shows the current slide; Page Down and Page Up step from slide to slide, and links between slides work
• Find with Ctrl+F

Everywhere

• Zoom with the toolbar, the keyboard, Ctrl+mouse wheel or pinch
• Live reload that keeps your place
• Dark, light and high contrast themes
• Keyboard and screen reader support
• English and Turkish

Getting started

1. Install Nightdocs from the Visual Studio Marketplace, or search for "Nightdocs" in the Extensions view.
2. Open a .docx, .xlsx, .xlsm, .pptx, .pptm or .ppsx file. Nightdocs is the default viewer for these files.

If another extension also opens these files, right-click the file and choose Open With… › Nightdocs, then Configure default editor. Or add this to your settings:

"workbench.editorAssociations": {
  "*.docx": "nightdocs.viewer",
  "*.xlsx": "nightdocs.viewer",
  "*.xlsm": "nightdocs.viewer",
  "*.pptx": "nightdocs.viewer"
}

Keyboard shortcuts

Limitations

• The older binary formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt) aren't supported yet.
• Password-protected files can't be opened; Nightdocs says so and offers to open them in Office.
• Excel formulas aren't recalculated: cells show the values saved in the file.
• Excel charts, icon sets and conditional formatting rules with custom formulas aren't drawn yet.
• PowerPoint animations, transitions, speaker notes and media playback aren't shown. Some pasted vector pictures (EMF/WMF) appear as placeholders.

Contributing

Bug reports and ideas are welcome in issues. See CONTRIBUTING.md to build and test the extension.

License

MIT. Third-party components and their licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.