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[xplorer˛] — Native office 2007 preview
home » blog » 25 July 2010 |
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xplorer˛ can preview many document types, from plain text and images, to office and PDF documents as well as video and audio files. Just turn on the View > Quick viewer pane and click on a file you want to preview. As explained elsewhere the QV has a draft tab for quick inspection and a native tab which renders exact previews just like the native document handler (e.g. microsoft office).
I prefer the draft mode, because it is quicker and because it collaborates with text searches showing the matching text in documents. The native mode feels a bit slow and cramped. You must resize xplorer˛ to get a decent preview area. It is just as quick to hit <ENTER> on the file to open it in its associated program, e.g. MS Word.
Somebody in MS must feel the same about embedded previews, and for a few years now office 2007 and later documents open straight in the office application instead of internet explorer (which is what lies under the native preview tab in xplorer˛). As a result the native preview tab doesn't do much and this upsets some xplorer˛ users.
| If you want to make use of the native preview tab for office 2007 documents (word, excel, powerpoint etc), then you must download and apply KB-927009. This modifies a few registry entries that control how office documents handle embedding. For example the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Excel.Sheet.12 has its BrowserFlags value changed from 0x00000008 to 0x80000a00. You don't have to meddle with the registry, just click on 'Fix this problem' (see picture to the right) and you can have all the changes done automatically. |
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The procedure and the results for office 2007 documents is highlighted in today's demo video 
Users with older versions of MS office (e.g. 2003) shouldn't have this problem, so there's no need to fix it. However similar browserflag tweaks exist for older office versions. That's useful if you want to block xplorer˛ native previewer and open word and excel documents externally.
ps. For office 2010 a similar fix can be found here: KB-982995.
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