Support to Preview Extra File Types in Outlook 2007 or Vista
27 January, 2009
Support to Preview Extra File Types in Outlook 2007 or Vista
If you use Outlook 2007 you probably already know that you can preview attachments from within Outlook. However, the built in support in fairly limited, being restricted to common types like office files, video and audio files.
However, this list is extensible using custom preview handlers. If you search on the internet for Outlook 2007 file previewers there’s a lot of hits. I’ve just downloaded some sample ones from a MSDN magazine article. Now I can preview files such as xml and pdf from within Outlook without saving them to disk and then re-opening them.
There’s more information at My Digital Life.
Windows Explorer in Vista can also take advantage of the same handlers if you turn on the Preview pane under Organize | Layout. I’ve now got this turned on and am finding it really useful as I generally have a lot of xml files which I need a quick look into.
So an example of previewing an xml file in Outlook is:
