Preview Documents Without Opening Them In Word 2007
If you have a lot of Word documents and are not sure which one contains the information you need, Microsoft Word 2007 allows you to preview a document within Word without having to open each document.
Open Word and click on the Microsoft Office Button and choose Open.
The Open Dialog box will appear. On the right hand side of the toolbar click the down arrow on views and choose Preview.
This will open the preview pane. Click on any file on the left hand side and preview what inside the file. When you find the file you need just click Open.
Mysticgeek is the resident IT expert at How-To Geek and a huge rock music fan. When he's not writing about Microsoft Office, he's probably writing at his personal blog. This article was written on 05/21/07 and tagged with: Microsoft Office
This doesn't work on vista:)
That's interesting… I'll have to figure out why.
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"This doesn’t work on vista:)
nick zara on May 23, 2007 8:18 pm"
Did anyone ever figure out anything about this?
Yes, This feature is not available on Win Vista Ultimate either… Any clue why not?
Yes it is, to preview a Doc in Vista using Word 2007, use open as above when the dialog pop's up select Organize - Layout - Preview Pane, this will stay on until switched off.
I have Vista and Word 2007 and I cannot preview a document without opening it.
W. Werner
In Windows Vista, and Word 2007, I choose Open > Organize > Layout > Preview Pane and…
I see the preview pane but when I select a document it does not show in the preview pane??? The pane remains completely blank. Could this be because I am trying to preview .DOC documents instead of .DOCX documents?
no, it doesn't work for docx either. It does work in explorer on both doc and docx, but i cant get it to show in open in word no matter what I try grrrr.
I wish someone would find a fix for this too. When I select Open and click on any Word file the Preview Pane remains blank. I can however preview Excel files, graphics files like .jpg, text files like .txt, but I cannot preview Word files within Word. I opened up Excel and I cannot preview any excel files, but I can preview other file types like Word, graphics, text, etc.
What is confusing to me is why can Word preview Excel documents, but not its own Word docs? Likewise, why can Excel preview Word documents, but not its own Excel documents? However, using Vista Explorer I can successfully view all file types in the preview pane within Vista.
I've spent hours on this issue to no avail………..
I am not offered a "preview" option on the views menu
I am also not offered a "preview" option on lmy views menu. It is on the Options/layout drop down. But it still does not work the way it is supposed to.
Bud
I have spent soooo much time on this. Microsoft said it was a "known" issue that would be resolved with the next service pack. Very annoying.
If anyone has a fix sooner, please post.
Don't bother calling MS. They can't help.
Work Around! - just preview them in Explorer rather than Word.
It seems to be a problem with Word rather than Vista as using Windows Explorer with a preview pane it works fine and the result is the same.
To enable the preview pane in Windows Vista Explorer, simply launch any Explorer window in folder view. At the folder menu, the select Organize, and then click on Layout, and finally select Preview Pane.
To set this as the default setting select Folder options and select set this as the default on the view tab.
Thank you Blindasabat..your solution works fine on my system and it will definitely save me time in searching for documents.
Yes, but shouldn't the feature just work the way it supposed to!?!
D' ya think?
So far, I am sharing the strange issues mentioned of Excel able to preview only Word file and vice versa, but I have one more; I use a lot of macros that are kept in Personal.xlsb in the XLSTART folder. If I preview an Excel file in Windows Explorer and then double click to open it, my Personal.xlsb is not available because it is locked by the Excel.exe that is running in the background to power the preview.
Microsoft, after a dozen emails and 3 hours on the telephone, cannot help. Can any real person help or have an idea for a work around?