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How to open an XML file in Chrome, Edge, Excel and Word

Open a archive XML in Google ChromeMicrosoft edge, word and Excel It is not something too complicated and in this simple guide we are going to see how to achieve it quickly and easily, as we are used to in Islabit.

XML, known as Marketplace Extension Language, is a platform-independent markup language used to transport data or exchange information between applications and devices. These are plain text files. It is even possible to use a basic word processor to open them without any kind of problem, such as Notepad that comes pre-installed in Windows.

However, in some cases it may be necessary for us to open it in a specific app, such as Chrome, Edge, Excel or Word. Luckily, this is not something difficult to achieve.

Open XML file in Microsoft Excel

Excel is capable of handling XML data. We can open this class of files, see and edit its content. To do it is quite simple and there are two methods to achieve it.

The first will be from the file menu. We open Excel, we go to File in the upper left and select Open. Now we are going to look for the file on our computer and press Open again. We will see that a dialog box appears where we will have three different options. We recommend choosing the one that says As an XML table.

The second option is to load the data for this document class using Power Query. This is a considerably useful Excel data automation tool.

We open Microsoft Excel and click on the Data tab. Now we are going to have to go to Get data > From file > From XML. We will look for the document that we want to open on our computer and click on Import.

Next, we will see that the Excel browser opens that allows us to see the design of the file in question. We will select the data table from the left sidebar of the browser to preview it. Then, we are going to press Load.

Open an XML document in Word

In Word it is also a very simple process. We go to File > Open > Browse and locate the document we want to open. Then, in the File Type drop-down menu, we will have to choose XML Files, select the file and click Open.

One thing to consider is that Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, and 2013 do not support custom XML elements. So if we try to open one of these files in Word, the custom elements will be removed and we will only see the text.

However, we do not have to lose hope because there is a trick to be able to open the XML in Word without problems.

  • We open the XML file in our web browser (see the guides below).
  • We go to More options > Print.
  • We chose Save as PDF from the Printer/Destination dropdown menu.
  • We click Save.
  • Now we start Word.
  • We go to Open> Browse.
  • In the Open dialog, we’re going to need to check that Files of type is set to All Files.
  • We look for the XML document and proceed to open it.
  • An alert will appear, we accept it without further ado.

Thanks to this simple trick, the XML file is converted into a PDF and all custom labels are respected, which we can see when we open it in Microsoft Word.

However, what we need to consider is that due to the conversion process, the original XML structure will be lost. So we’ll have to take this into consideration before going ahead with this method.

Something else to consider is that when we use Word to save the file in an XML document format, what we’ll find is that new XML data is included which can seem overwhelming. The reason for this is that with the release of Office 2007, Microsoft completely changed the structure of its document format from simple binary to a combination of XML and binary files. For this reason an X was added to the end of these file extensions, for example: XMLX, DOCX, PPTX, etc.

Open XML file in Google Chrome

Actually, all modern browsers are capable of opening these kinds of files and they make things far too easy to accomplish.

In order to open an XML file from Chrome, we are going to have to open Windows File Explorer and find the location of the XML document. Then we are going to right click on the file and choose the option that says Open with in the context menu.

If among the options we see Google Chrome, we will click on it. Otherwise, we will have to click on Choose another application. If we see Chrome in Suggested applications or More options, we will click on it. However, if it does not appear, then the only thing left is to click on Choose an application. A window opens that will allow us to navigate to the location where Chrome is installed. We proceed to click on the Chrome executable file when we find it and the XML document will open in the browser automatically.

Open XML document in Microsoft Edge

From the File Explorer we are going to have to look for the XML file. Once we find it, we are going to right-click on the file and choose Open with> Microsoft Edge. This file will open in the Edge browser in read-only format.

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