Open Document Preview

[strunad6]

Hello!

Does anyone knows, how to preview a document before opening it. This function has MS Office.
In the case, when someone has a lot of documents with similar file names, its difficult to find a document just by reading these names. So a quick preview of the whole document would be nice, because its opening takes too much time.

Best Regards,

Iztok

[TerryE]

Sorry but this functionality doesn't currently exist

[acknak]

I don't know how much of a preview you get with Office, but I can at least get a look at the first page of my OOo docs in the file manager:

It's just a thumbnail, so the quality is poor (text is not readable, e.g.), but it can be useful in some situations.

[TerryE]

A, so you are right. The File viewer seems to understand that the Thumbnails/thumbnail.png in the ODS container is a preview. I don't know of anyway to increase the image size to make it more useful.

[foxcole]

A, so you are right. The File viewer seems to understand that the Thumbnails/thumbnail.png in the ODS container is a preview. I don't know of anyway to increase the image size to make it more useful.

There isn't. Even if you do make it larger, the thumbnail is only a sketchy representation of a page, so you won't get any more information from a larger version than from the tiny one. The image data just isn't there.

[Dave]

Windows:
There is a freeware file manager called "Free Commander" whose "Quickview" menu option will allow quick viewing of almost any file, including OO files.

David.

[foxcole]

Windows:
There is a freeware file manager called "Free Commander" whose "Quickview" menu option will allow quick viewing of almost any file, including OO files.

Oh, that's awesome! I was looking on SourceForge and didn't find anything nearly so useful. I'm especially happy that it can run portably. Thanks for that link!

[acknak]

I'd be very interested in how that works. Displaying a high-quallity "preview" is a tough problem. I assume that MS can do it because they control the entire stack, so when Office is installed, it can pin the core of the application in memory and integrate deeply with the file manager to essentially open and display the documents quickly enough to be useful. Perhaps they cache a higher-quality preview (XPS?) of the first page.

Doing something similar for OOo would be nigh impossible; calling OOo itself to display a preview is not going to be very satisfying

Generating and caching a PDF preview would be an interesting approach, but even a PDF of one page can be a large file if the document includes a large number of fonts.