Enable more file types on Windows Vista Explorer Preview Pane

Posted on April 30, 2008 at 5:29 am

One of the great things about Windows Vista is the new Preview Pane in Windows Explorer. Now you can simply click on a file and get a preview of the document without having to open it! However, one of the not so great things about Vista is the fact that a lot of files types don’t work in the Preview Pane!

The only work around to this problem was to edit the registry and manually put in each file extension. It’s a painfully long registry hack that even I would not want to do. Luckily, someone developed a GUI Windows program that finds all the different files types registered on your computer and lets you enable previews for them!

Here’s a shot of the Windows Explorer Preview Pane in Windows Vista for a Word document:

Image Source: ActiveWin

So by default, Microsoft set the files types that will work with the Preview Pane for mostly common and proprietary formats, such as .txt, .doc, .ppt, .xls, etc, but not for other very common types of files such as .php, .css, etc.

Just in case you don’t know, you can enable the Preview Pane in Vista Explorer by going to Organize at the top, then Layout and then choosing Preview Pane.

PreviewConfig is a very nifty and useful application that was developed to solve just this problem. It allows you to add new file extensions to the default list of supported file extensions. Once you install and run it, you’ll see the listing of files types on the left hand side.

Click on one of the extensions on the left and you’ll get information about it on the right pane. You’ll be able to see if the file is already configured for previews and if so, what the preview type is: plain-text, media file, or others. If it’s set to None, then you can activate previews by selecting one of the other options and clicking Apply.

For PHP, CSS, REG files and more, you could select Plain-text and then go to Explorer to see a preview of your file! Enjoy! Source: HowToGeek

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