Vista - doc thumbnails question

On my desktop, I have a .doc file saved and Vista shows a thumbnail of what it really looks like. However, in my Documents folder, none of my .doc files are displayed as a thumbnail but instead all show the standard MS Word icon (I do have this one OpenOffice drawing file saved in my Documents which displays as a thumbnail).

My questions is simple: What determines whether or not Vista will display a thumbnail for a .doc file?

Thanks a lot.

Update: I recently just made some more OpenOffice documents and they all display the thumbnail.

ummm...normally they are set to default as an MS icon i believe, you may have changed the settings? Not to sure

Hi Jim,

Check to see if you have the preview thumbnails turned on. See:

How to Turn Folder Preview Thumbnails On or Off in Windows Explorer in Vista


You might also go ahead and clear the thumbnail cache in case it is corrupted. This would reset it and allow Vista to rebuild them automatically.

How to Clear the Thumbnail Cache in Vista


Shawn

Thanks Shawn. I unchecked the "Always show icons not thumbnails" option then rechecked it and clicked Apply to All Folders. Then I cleared all my thumbnails. Still no thumbnails except for my OpenOffice documents and my 1 .doc file. Also, I just checked the folders in my Documents and a few of the .doc files do have thumbnails and the others don't.

I have two questions, do you think CCleaner could have messed up my settings for my thumbnails? And my last question, do you have all the thumbnails for .doc files working?

Jim,

I do not think CCleaner would mess it up. I use TextMaker Viewer instead of OpenOffice, so I'm not sure what differences there are betweeen the two. Currently I do not have any doc files though.

http://www.officeviewers.com/


Since it is only the 1 doc file, you might check to see if you accidently changed it's folder preview. See if clicking Restore Default helps any. See: How to Change a Folder Preview Picture in Vista

Shawn

I've got a few .doc files that show the thumbnail, and the others don't show it. In some of my folders, I may have like 2 .doc files that show the thumbnail, and the rest don't. I can take a screenshot of it if you want.

After googling my problem for a few minutes, I found someone with a similar problem although I don't really understand the guys response to it. Perhaps someone here understands it? It's the response made by BrianWren from p2p.wrox.com Forums - Create a thumbnail image of a Word doc.

Jim,

I must admit that I'm a bit stumped to. Go ahead and post a small screenshot of them. Perhaps someone may recognize something from it and help them help you.

Shawn

Ok it's cool. Don't worry about it. I'll just post a screenshot and hopefully someone would know how to do it. I'll post 4 screenshots each of a different folder showing thumbnails and icons mixed together.

You'll probably find that because some thumbnails are "missing" from DOC and XLS files is because they where not saved to include a thumbnail.

In Office 2007, whenever you save a document or spreadsheet, the "Save As", you can check/uncheck the "Save Thumbnail" option. I havn't used Office 2003 for awhile now, so I'm no too sure if that option exists there also.

Hmmm... I did have Office 2007 when it was a Beta and made a few docs with it, but I think I still made a few files with Office 2003 which display as thumbnails. Thanks for the insight though.