preview pane

[Guest]

does anyone know how to make preview pane preview office docs .
I have office 2003 professional and vista ultimate. Preview pane in explorer
previews pictures music and even adobe pdf files but willl not do office docs
from word or excel. microsoft support says it does not do them but why.
So I am hoping that someone out there knows how to fix the problem as I cant
see the point of preview pane if it does not preview your word docs.

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

The Preview Pane runs on a "plug-in" model where a component suitable for
previewing each file type must be installed and registered on the machine.
For Office documents the previewer components ship with Office 2007, but not
Office 2003 {because, amongst other reasons, Office 2003 had already shipped
prior to the time the Vista previewer architecture was designed}.

 

[Arend]

Hi,

I have the same problem and honestly I don’t quite understand this! Vista
shows in preview pane pdf files but not office 2003 files?
Is this plug-in you mentioned anywhere available for download? Or we need to
go and buy office 2007 in order to see the documents in the preview pane of
vista????!!!

Regards,
Christos

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

Vista comes with a previewer mechanism, but it doesn't come with a Time
Machine . Office 2003 doesn't know anything about the Vista previewer
because it was released before Vista existed - in general an updated version
of the app that handles the format needs to be updated to include previewer
support. This includes Adobe PDF Reader and Microsoft Office.

Dave

 

[Arend]

Hello Dave,

It looks like vista did come with a time machine because outlook 2003 emails
(which use word 2003 as an editor) can easily be reviewed maintaining even
all format! Obviously the time machine doesn’t work for the other office
applications for a reason that only Microsoft knows. The last time I’ve
checked Windows and Office were both being manufactured by Microsoft, and it
is quite odd that third party apps (see adobe) have updated their software
while a year later Microsoft hasn’t.

Do I “see†something wrong?

Regards,
Christos

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

Yes Outlook mail items can be previewed in the previewer. That's because
Vista uses the standard MAPI APIs to preview the e-mails. But in general you
need an updated version of the app to preview file formats which aren't
natively recognized by Vista. In the case of Office docs like Excel or Word
docs that means using Office 2007. Office components don't in general ship
with the OS, as I'm sure you are aware ...

Hello Dave,

It looks like vista did come with a time machine because outlook 2003
emails
(which use word 2003 as an editor) can easily be reviewed maintaining even
all format! Obviously the time machine doesn’t work for the other office
applications for a reason that only Microsoft knows. The last time I’ve
checked Windows and Office were both being manufactured by Microsoft, and
it
is quite odd that third party apps (see adobe) have updated their software
while a year later Microsoft hasn’t.

Do I “see†something wrong?

Regards,
Christos

 

[Arend]

Indeed office components do not come with OS and I am aware of this. However,
it looks like you are not aware that Windows Explorer, where the preview pane
is located, is not part of the office but of the OS. And Microsoft should
have had the courtesy to support in the preview pane its own products. But it
looks like Microsoft thought that the day that vista were released the whole
world would go shopping office 2007.

You should also be aware that you do not need to be sarcastic for no reason
and especially not when your arguments suck!!

 

[Dave Wood [MS]]

The overall principle of the previewer is that the previewer manager ships
with the OS, but the individual previewers for different file formats do not
{beyond a couple of basic ones like Txt, Html, Mapi which are included in
the box}. Previewers for individual application file formats, whether from
Microsoft or anyone else need to supplied as part of the app - we don't
generally special-case Microsoft apps over non-Microsoft ones {for many
reasons}.

Dave

 

[IJM]

Surely someone can fix this problem!

I installed WDS 4.0 on my XP machine with Office 2003 and the previews work
properly.

Update of my laptop (XP Home) with WDS 4.0 results in not being able to
preview Word, Excel and Visio files.

Does anybody know of a third party "plug in" to make this work?

Regards!

 

[Nonny]

Surely someone can fix this problem!

I installed WDS 4.0 on my XP machine with Office 2003 and the previews work
properly.

Update of my laptop (XP Home) with WDS 4.0 results in not being able to
preview Word, Excel and Visio files.

Does anybody know of a third party "plug in" to make this work?

Ask your question in an XP group.

This one is for Vista.

 

[IJM]

The problem is with Vista!

None of the problems of previewing Office 2003 documents occur with XP with
Windows Desktop Search (WDS) installed.

As noted, I upgraded my Vista machine using Windows Update to Windows
Desktop Search 4.0 and it does not allow previews of Office 2003 documents.

Should have I installed the full version of WDS 4.0?

Regards!

 

[Nonny]

The problem is with Vista!

The why did you say:

 

[IJM]

I do apologize for my error!

My laptop has Vista Home and that is where the problem is occuring.

It turns out that the version of offfilt.dll is different on the XP and
Vista computers.

Could it be as simple as that?

Regards!

 

[Wandering]

I do apologize for my error!

My laptop has Vista Home and that is where the problem is occuring.

It turns out that the version of offfilt.dll is different on the XP and
Vista computers.

Could it be as simple as that?

Regards!

The information for the icons on files comes from the installed program, not
from the OS. Vista changed the requirements for these, and software created
before Vista, (example Office 2003) will not supply the required data to
Vista. I don't know of any fix other than updating the software - a very
expensive proposition. I doubt MS has much interest in updating Office 2003
to suit Vista, when they would rather sell you Office 2007, which will
provide the necessary data and works as you desire. Good luck.

 

[IJM]

Thanks for the response!

All versions of Adobe PDFs preview correctly so it must be possible to get
all versions of Office products to do so as well.

The following is a quote from
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/desktopsearchifilters/.

"What filetypes does Windows Desktop Search index by default?

Windows Desktop Search comes with IFilters for the following file types (see
the official list).

Document Type IFilter DLL
ASCX, ASP, ASPX, CSS, HHC, HTA, HTM, HTML, HHT, HTW, HTX, ODC, STM
nlhtml.dll

DOC, DOT, POT, PPS, PPT, XLB, XLC, XLS, XLT offfilt.dll

TXT, ASM, BAT, C, CPP, CXX, CMD, DEF, DIC, H, HPP, XML, ... as plain text
query.dll

RTF rtffilt.dll

EML mimefilt.dll "

It should state that the older versions of Office files will not preview in
Vista.

Regards!

 

[Wandering]

Thanks for the response!

All versions of Adobe PDFs preview correctly so it must be possible to get
all versions of Office products to do so as well.

The following is a quote from
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/desktopsearchifilters/.

"What filetypes does Windows Desktop Search index by default?

Windows Desktop Search comes with IFilters for the following file types
(see
the official list).

Document Type IFilter DLL
ASCX, ASP, ASPX, CSS, HHC, HTA, HTM, HTML, HHT, HTW, HTX, ODC, STM
nlhtml.dll

DOC, DOT, POT, PPS, PPT, XLB, XLC, XLS, XLT offfilt.dll

TXT, ASM, BAT, C, CPP, CXX, CMD, DEF, DIC, H, HPP, XML, ... as plain text
query.dll

RTF rtffilt.dll

EML mimefilt.dll "

It should state that the older versions of Office files will not preview
in
Vista.

Regards!

There is no relationship between Adobe and MS, so your assumption is broken.
In any event, if you have updated Adobe within the last couple of years, it
does provide the necessary information to Vista. MS Office 2003 does not.
Sorry to disappoint you and good luck on you fruitless search.

 

[Dave Wood [MSFT]]

Right, indexing and search should work fine with Office 2003 on Vista, but
unfortnately you won't be able to get previews unless you have Office 2007.
The previewing system in Vista is very different to the one in WDS on XP.

Note that IFilters including OffFilt.dll are for indexing, they aren't
related to rpeviewing.