Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane

Windows 7 includes a lot of improvements in the Windows Explorer. Most of them are fairly obvious, but the new preview pane is likely to go unnoticed (or passed over as the same as Vista’s preview pane) by a lot of people.

The new preview pane supports a much wider range of formats than the Windows XP and Windows Vista preview pane did, including the ability to preview HTML, text files, XML files, images, videos, music, and WordPad files without any additional software installed. If you have Microsoft Office installed, you get previews for all of the Office document formats and if Adobe Acrobat Reader is installed, you can preview PDF files.

To enable the preview pane, you can use the explorer toolbar button, the Organize menu, or by pressing Alt+P:

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posted on Saturday, May 16, 2009 5:18 PM

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# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 5/18/2009 8:17 AM EricSB

I'm very happy with Windows 7 so far. I think Microsoft has a REAL winner on their hands. I remain impressed with the speed and snappyness in which the OS works.

I agree that the preview pane is rather nice... I just so happened to be playing with it a bit this weekend. Thank you for this post!

EricSB
http://www.twitter.com/EricSB

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 10/15/2009 3:35 PM Bill Bennett

Well yes, it's a great feature, but I've found the Adobe Acrobat Reader function doesn't actually work in practice. I can't determine if its a problem with Windows or with Acrobat, but my PDFs are not showing previews.

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 10/19/2009 4:07 PM VJ

Neither do any Office 2003 documents on Win 7 x64

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 10/20/2009 6:46 PM Dirk Schwarzmann

Hey Bill, I stumbled over the solution for PDF preview before recognizing there´s a problem with it... Look here: http://www.ditii.com/2009/09/11/fix-for-adobe-pdf-preview-handler-bug-in-64-bit-windows/
Since it is meant for 64bit-Windows, applying it to 32bit-Windows is quite easy: just leave out the "Wow6432Node" branch in the registry path.

Dirk

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 12/2/2009 9:39 AM help

The fix in teh registry change posted everywhere does not work for me. I am running windows 7 home premium

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 12/2/2009 9:40 AM help

The fix in the registry change posted everywhere does not work for me. I am running windows 7 home premium

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 2/3/2010 3:47 PM David Putnam

Is there any fix to WinExplorer Win 7 64 bit NOT previewing Office 2003 files (doc, xls, etc).....no one seems to be bothered about it but it is a royal pain for me....or any WinExplorer substitutes...PowerDesk was my favorite but does NOT work with Win 7...arrrgh!

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 4/2/2010 9:10 AM M Mike

How do you keep the preview pane the same size evertime you open a folder, without having to drag it to the size you want. With vista the preview ane would stay the same size with windows 7 you have to resize it everytime you turn you comuter back on. This become a real pain!

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 11/23/2010 6:44 AM MA Hussain

Preview pane shows all the office documents but the power point presentation! Is there any setting to preview ppt. Please help.

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 11/28/2010 9:06 PM Dario Mavric

I'm having an issue with this. I only see the tiles in either of the windows of explorer - should I not be able to see the image - hence the name "preview pane"? what have I not turned on???

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 2/2/2011 3:39 AM Babu Desai

i have problem with preview pane option ... its working with sum files and giving problem with sum files is any solution ????

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 4/5/2012 2:35 AM MRT

How to preview files with another application, according to the extension?

# re: Windows 7 Explorer Preview Pane 4/27/2012 9:59 PM Alicia Martinez

Even without Adobe installed, you can preview PDF files with PDF Preview Handler offered by Vivid Document Solutions free of charge,

http://www.win7pdf.com/pdf-preview.html

Scott Dorman

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