Word 2007 Document Preview Pane

[Guest]

I have a new HP PC running Vista which came with Office 2007 preinstalled.
Since purchasing the PC I have licensed Office 2007 and registered the
product. The problem I have encountered is that Word 2007 will not show me a
preview of a document file even though I have turned on the Preview Pane in
the Open File panel. Has anyone else encountered this?

 

[Beth Melton]

Did you select the Save Thumbnails option in the Save As dialog box?

Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email cannot be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Coauthor of Word 2007 Inside Out:
http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/9801.aspx#AboutTheBook

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/

 

[Guest]

No I have not selected the Save Thumbnails option. Is this required?

My docs are a mix of Word 2007 and Word 2003 created files, and neither type
will show as a preview.

I get the 'Select a file to preview' text in the preview pane, however when
I click on a word file no preview appears, the pane is empty.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

I'm seeing exactly what you're seeing, Ham. I'm using Vista Ultimate.
Preview works fine in Word 2003 (which is also installed), and all of my
Word 2007 settings are correct for displaying previews. It simply is not
working on Word files in Word 2007. It does seem to work fine for Excel
files, pictures, and some other file types. For non-previewable items, it
correctly says "Preview not available." For Word files, however, it says
nothing at all. The preview space is simply blank. It should NEVER be blank.

I just checked another computer (Office 2007 on Vista Home Premium), and
preview isn't working for Word files there either.

The method is different when running Word 2007 in Windows XP. There, preview
is working fine.

I'm going to explore this some--see if preview is malfunctioning on all of
my Vista installations--and see what I can learn. I'll also check with other
MVPs to see if they can test this, too, under Vista. I'd never noticed this
problem before in Vista RTM, so I don't know if it's a new problem. I do
have graphical evidence (screen shots) that it was working correctly in at
least one of the Vista beta versions.

I just love a good mystery...

Beth: Are you using Vista or Windows XP? If Vista, are you able to see
previews of .doc and .docx files in the file dialogs?

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

There's definitely something flaky about this. I tried the following:

1. Started Word with the /a switch, and previews suddenly worked.

2. Deleted the .pip file for Word, and previews suddenly worked. Closed
Word, it created a new .pip file, and restarted, and previews no longer
worked. Deleted the pip file, and previews still didn't work. (I had tried
renaming various parts of the Word tree in the registry, then renaming
normal.dot and normal.dotx, none of which had any effect. Only renaming the
pip file seemed to have any effect... but it stopped having an effect rather
quickly.)

3. Tried previews for doc/docx files from Excel... and they worked! But,
only briefly. After starting/restarting Excel several times. previews for
some Word files continued to work, but stopped working for others.
Eventually, previews stopped working.

4. Rebooted, then tried Word with the /a switch. Previews didn't work.

5. Started Word normallly. Previews suddenly worked!

This is all very flaky. Something is deeply disturbed about all this, since
it's 12:30 am, I'm going to leave it til tomorrow.

Best advice... try rebooting and see if previews work. If they do, then
you're having the same flaky performance I'm having.

--
Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog: http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web: http://www.herbtyson.com

 

[Guest]

Thanks Herb. I tried rebooting but no joy, still same scenario.

I have witnessed preview working on a notebook with Vista and Word2007, so I
know it is possible!

Would like to hear from anyone who can solve this one.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Has anyone found a solution to this annoying problem/issue?

Thanks,

AP

 

[Guest]

I also have this issue. I've tried everything I can think of over the
months. I have thousands of documents and the preview pane in past versions
saved me tons of hours of searching. I'm ready to go back to an XP version.
I can get a thumbnail of the documents but it is too small to read the
content. Help!

 

[Guest]

Hi Doc - This is apparently a "known issue and a bug" and here's the
UNFORTUNATE response I got from Microsoft Technical Support:

Cause

Unknown...could be a memory or resources issue...

Resolution

No resolution available

This is a known issue as per Office bug 735002.

So I guess we have to wait until a Service Pack comes out :-(

APinPHX