Vista - Word Docs Don't Exhibit In Vista Explorer Preview Pane

Word documents do not exhibit in the Vista Explorer preview pane. Excel and
Powerpoint documents exhibit as intended.

Most of the time when I highlight a Word doc in Vista Explorer, I get a
message that Word 2007 has an error, and after Windows searches for a
solution, another messsage appears to the effect that Word must be closed.

Every once in a while it works properly. Other times the Word document will
appear in the preview pane but then freezes.

I've tried it with newly created .docx files, but that makes no difference
(almost all my files were created in Office 2000/XP).

I've looked at the Event log, but if there were any clues there I'm not
sophisticated enough to determine that.

Vista Business and Office 2007 came pre-installed on my Dell machine.

As one of the more useful features of Vista (to me at least) I would very
much like to get this to work. No-one seems to have a solution. Any
thoughts?

I'm having the exact same problem. Anyone else? Is there an Office Word
2007 complaint file we can contact?

"paulp" wrote:

> Word documents do not exhibit in the Vista Explorer preview pane. Excel and
> Powerpoint documents exhibit as intended.
>
> Most of the time when I highlight a Word doc in Vista Explorer, I get a
> message that Word 2007 has an error, and after Windows searches for a
> solution, another messsage appears to the effect that Word must be closed.
>
> Every once in a while it works properly. Other times the Word document will
> appear in the preview pane but then freezes.
>
> I've tried it with newly created .docx files, but that makes no difference
> (almost all my files were created in Office 2000/XP).
>
> I've looked at the Event log, but if there were any clues there I'm not
> sophisticated enough to determine that.
>
> Vista Business and Office 2007 came pre-installed on my Dell machine.
>
> As one of the more useful features of Vista (to me at least) I would very
> much like to get this to work. No-one seems to have a solution. Any
> thoughts?
>
>

I came across this thread when trying to nut out an Excel issue on Vista. It turns out that there are a number of interesting nasties associated with certain file types when using the new Vista Preview Pane (in Windows Explorer), not seen in XP or even in Vista when the Preview Pane is not displayed.

My Excel spreadsheets are actually mini applications with embedded VBA. When I click once on the application/XLS (yes, they started life as an XLS), Excel.EXE gets called to generate the preview. If you double-click, the app opens normally and executes, until you save/exit (big red X).

At this time the underlying Windows Explorer window is locked with a "ping" sound on every click attempt. The only way to exit is Alt-Ctrl-Del and use Task Manager to kill the explorer window.

When you next enter the Excel, it also dies again, but this time resets the spreadsheet, so the third use it is clean...so long as you don't use the Preview Pane.

As workarounds:
- Turn off Preview Pane (Organize, Layout, Preview Pane)
- Don't click once before opening the file/app which generates the preview, just double click with another file selected
- Open Excel as an application, and use the Recent Documents list
- Double click from an email attachment or the desktop (these both work as there is no preview pane option)

I guess there are two other points:
- Rename the XLS to XLSM - as curiously there is no application linked to XLSM as a preview generator
- Somehow, we need to find out whether there is a code limitation which causes this to happen. I have tried trivial macros and cannot recreate the problem, but any XLS "application" dies in the same way, virtually every time.

Oh, the final option would be for MS to write a fix for this.

I've written this in the interests of it being probably related to the previous (old) thread, as I can't see that the issue has been addressed since then.

CT