For instance, if your colleague sends you a Powerpoint presentation, you can view the slides right inside Outlook 2007. And you don't have to install Microsoft Powerpoint on the computer, not even the free Powerpoint viewer.
Attachment Previewers for most common Office Applications, text documents and image files are pre-installed with Office 2007 while additional file previewers may be downloaded from the Office Online website. And like Outlook 2003, you can always double click the email attachment to open it inside the associated application.
If there are multiple attachments in an email message, say a HTML webpage and jpeg image, they will display in separate preview pane but in the same message window. Outlook file previewers also let you navigate inside documents and presentations that extend to more than one page.
Will save lot of time since you no longer have to wait for bulky Adobe Reader to load before you can view the contents of that 10 Kb PDF attachment.
Related: Create, Edit & Save Office 2007 Documents in Office 2003
Quick Note: These file previewers also allow you to preview files in Windows Explorer on Microsoft Windows Vista. If you are not using Office 2007, you may enjoy similar feature with X1 Desktop Search tool - X1 comes with even more file previewers like Adobe Illustrator and CAD file. Detailed Review of X1.
Reader Comments
FYI, the previewer for PDFs isn't here yet!
Written on 9/12/06 7:31 PM
You are right Ram - There aren't any previewers for PDF and lot of other common file formats.
Maybe MSFT would release them once the Office 2007 release is public, ie, Jan 2007 or early Feb.
Written on 9/12/06 7:33 PM
Nope. ALmost the end of January. We've had Office 2007 for over a month now and I am kind of tired of fielding calls about the "This file cannot be previewed because there is not previewer installed for it." message. It's kind of deceiving and my users think something is wrong with their installation. Anyways, you'd think that MS would have a previewer for such a popular and widespread format as PDF by now.
Written on 18/1/07 3:07 AM
I too am looking for the PDF viewer, but I don't think it is Microsoft's fault that the viewer does not exist. They need to work with Adobe to release it. The problem is that I'm sure Adobe wants people to launch the full-blown Acrobat client in lieu of a simple viewer.
One other comment about the "Great Feature." Attachment previewing is not new. It's only new to outlook. In the early 1990s, when Lotus dominated messaging, cc:Mail and Notes had built-in viewers. Yes, it was a great feature 15 years ago too.
Written on 9/2/07 3:07 AM
According to MS, the responsibility of writing the previewer lies on the owner of the file format. In the case of PDF, Adobe is the company that will be responsible for publishing a previewer, and until they do, there isn't going to be anything we can do about it...unless someone else writes one first.
Written on 9/2/07 8:51 PM
Any idea why there is no html previewer either?
Written on 12/2/07 9:53 PM
Here's a PDF previewer
Written on 30/5/07 8:34 PM
Microsoft needs to finally bundle a simple, secure, and fast PDF reader with Windows. Maybe they can buy foxit software or something.
I can't imagine how many hours of my life I've wasted installing Adobe Acrobat Reader. Too many.
Written on 7/9/07 8:01 PM