How to associate attachment file types with a previewer?

[Thomas W. Brown]

....specifically the text file previewer. Working with a team of developers,
people are often sending attachments with .cs or .sql extensions and it would
be nice to be able to preview these as text.

Is there some way to tell Outlook that these file types should be associated
with the text previewer?

Regards,
-- TB

 

[Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]]

In Control Panel=>Folder Options->File Types - select the file extensions
you want to associate with the previewer (I use Notepad). You can also do
this by selecting the attachment and download to the desktop, right click
and select Open With and select your option - again, I prefer NotePad.

--
Milly Staples [MVP - Outlook]

Post all replies to the group to keep the discussion intact.
ALWAYS post your Outlook version.
How to ask a question: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/555375


After furious head scratching, Thomas W. Brown asked:

| ...specifically the text file previewer. Working with a team of
| developers, people are often sending attachments with .cs or .sql
| extensions and it would be nice to be able to preview these as text.
|
| Is there some way to tell Outlook that these file types should be
| associated with the text previewer?
|
| Regards,
| -- TB

 

[Weeble]

Unless I misunderstand you, that's not what the original poster was asking.
In Outlook when viewing a message you can click on the attachments along the
top and if they're a picture or a text file or an Office document you'll see
a preview of them in the main window. If instead it's a .cs or .sql or some
other sort of text-based file that Outlook doesn't know about you'll just see
a message "This file cannot be previewed because there is no previewer
installed for it." Registering a file association does not affect this - that
only affects what happens when you open the file.

I too would like to know how to register the plain text previewer to handle
more extensions in Outlook. It is exceptionally tedious to do save as on an
attachment, find it on disk and open it in an editor compared to how easy it
is to preview an attachment. It's often not an acceptable workaround to
associate a text editor as the default "open" action on some of these
file-types.

 

[Weeble]

I found instructions for doing this here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/cc163487.aspx

Scroll down to the section "If You've Got It, Flaunt It". From the article:

"There are a handful of preview handlers built into Windows Vista. However,
some of them can actually handle more file types than they're registered to
support by default. Take, for instance, the Microsoft Windows TXT Preview
Handler. As you can guess, this preview handler renders .txt files. But
nothing about this preview handler restricts it to working with just .txt. As
a developer, I frequently receive C#, Visual Basic®, and C++ code files as
e-mail attachments. And I'd love to be able to preview these attachments
within Outlook, rather than having to open Visual Studio® as the default
viewer. Well, I can. All I have to do is register .cs, .vb, .cpp, and .h
files as extensions to be previewed with the Microsoft Windows TXT Preview
Handler. The following .reg file does just that:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cs\shellex\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.vb\shellex\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.cpp\shellex\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.h\shellex\{8895b1c6-b41f-4c1c-a562-0d564250836f}]
@="{1531d583-8375-4d3f-b5fb-d23bbd169f22}"

"