# Overview of the Viewing ActiveX Control

Viewing includes an ActiveX control that provides the same functionality of the Viewing API. This control is ideally suited to Visual Basic developers, although it can be used in other development environments that support controls.

NOTE: For information on using the Viewing ActiveX control in a .NET application, see Develop .NET Applications.

You can use the Viewing controls to create an application (or HTML page) to:

- Open and view a document.

- Draw a page of a word processing document, spreadsheet, or a picture into a supplied Device Context (HDC). This is useful for generating thumbnail views of documents.

- Print a document (or print a document without viewing it) to a specified printer or to the default printer.

- Allow viewed word processing and spreadsheet documents to be saved as RTF, HTML, or text. Also, you can save image formats to other supported image formats.

- Convert word processing and spreadsheet documents to text, RTF, or HTML without viewing them.

- View or extract subfiles from a container file, such as ZIP, TAR, or PST.

- View and manipulate a graphic (including rotate and magnify).

- Annotate documents with a bitmap or selected text. The View API includes annotation event notification for actions such as clicking and double-clicking, allowing for implementation of hyperlinks and pop-up text.

- Highlight all occurrences of a word in a document.

- Filter spreadsheets, presentation graphics, and documents to text. A cross-platform C API that provides text filtering is also available. Contact Micro Focus for information on KeyView Filter SDK.

- Determine the format of a document based on its contents rather than its file extension.

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