Sneak a Peek with Outlook 2007 Attachment Previewers
The ability to ‘take a peek’ at a file attached to a message is one of the simple and convenient benefits of upgrading to Outlook 2007. By taking a peek at an attachment, I mean that you have the ability to preview attachments right in the Outlook Reading Pane, without having to run the program that the attachment normally works with. For example, send me a Word document as an attachment, and I can get a basic preview of the contents of the document in the Reading Pane without having to start Word. Compare this to the process with older versions of Outlook, where you couldn’t see the contents of that Word document without starting Word and viewing it there. The same attachment previewing capability is there for Excel spreadsheets and a variety of other kinds of files that people often email back and forth.
Why do I say that this new approach is better? I’ll give you to reasons why. First, you can preview attachments much faster and more conveniently than finding and launching the native program for the attachment file type, then opening the attachment in that program. Second, it is clearly a more intuitive way to work.
If you’re wondering how it is possible to preview attachments without using the programs the attachments work with, the answer is surprisingly simple. Outlook comes with a set of attachment previewers, which are small programs that can provide a limited view of the contents of an attached file without the capabilities of the full application that normally opens the file.
Outlook 2007 comes equipped with attachment previewers for major Microsoft Office files, plus previewers for common image and text file types. And some other companies have also published downloadable attachment previewers for their own file types. So you should already have, or be able to download, attachment previewers for the majority of file attachments you are likely to receive.
Once the attachment previewer you need is installed, using it is easy. When you have a message containing an attachment visible in the Reading Pane, Outlook displays a set of buttons at the top of the pane. The Message button shows you the body of the message when you click it. Along with the Message button, each attachment has its own button, showing the name of the attached file.
The button you click determines what appears in the Reading Pane. Click Message to see the contents of the email message. Click the button with the name of an attachment to get a preview of that attachment. Now remember that the preview of an attachment will not necessarily look exactly the same as the file would look if you opened it in the program it normally works with (a Word document in Word, for example). Even so, you’ll likely find attachment previewers to be very useful if people email you a lot of files.
For more information on attachment previewers, including several more little things you really should know, visit http://www.living-with-outlook.com/preview-attachments.html To learn about installing and using the official PDF attachment previewer from Adobe, click here.