Preview Pane, doc, docx, xlsx - by other than MS Office?

Hi, in order to see a preview of document formats other than the default types supported by Windows, a preview handler is needed. PDF readers often supply one for .pdf's; MS Office does for office document types.

Do you know of any other office-type program that provides a preview handler for office file types? (doc, docx etc)
I know where I'd expect to find these from the registry.

Examples that don't:
WPS Office, Libre Office, Atlantis Word Processor.

Thanks.

Thanks - sadly again, no preview, so I'll have to toss the fish back in. Ashampoo did an Office suite too.. but that's Softmaker too- then there's Open Office.. but maybe MS Office is the only one that provides preview handlers.

The old Office Compatibility pack doesn't help either.

Thanks Edwin, already have that one. The problem is I don't have the preview handler files. I believe I know how the registry is structured in this respect. Perhaps only MS Office provides one, but that's now not downloadable without a key it seems.

It's just a minor thing- I dislike the inconsistency, plus a matter of curiosity. I understand the New menu and can construct that using my own templates, know how the check box in Open With can disappear, and can even build a standard Recovery partition from scratch.

Example: for pdf
pdf:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.pdf\shellex\{e357fccd-a995-4576-b01f-234630154e96}

-> {e357fccd-a995-4576-b01f-234630154e96}

and
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{3D331846-CC43-42AE-BFF9-D914083C2BA3}
=> 3 keys related to preview and an AppID

and
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{3D381846-CC43-42AE-BFF9-D914083CZBA3}\InProcServer32
points to a dll

However even if I were to replicate just that, my guess would be that a lot of the rest of the rendering features of, say, Word would actually be used in constructing the preview.

That is, the only way to get one is to have a program installed that provides one- and I don't know of anything else that does for xlsx, docx etc... at least, I'm assuming Office does!

Bummer! QTTabBar doesn't work either.



Any discussion about it on Libre forums?

Oh yes, question has been asked for years. I've not tried Open Office- I assume that's similar. I can't actually find references to the preview for docx, doc, and more generally, except for its absence or problems related to Office and it not being shown.

Not a preview pane (handler) but you can get space bar previews for .docx (but not .doc) files and some other formats using Seer.

Seer file preview - install plugins Solved - Windows 7 Help Forums

If interested:

Seer - Browse Files at SourceForge.net

Thanks, yes, there are various universal viewers of that sort... I just hoped that one of the Office lookalike /alternative suites might have implemented it. As I said, more curiosity about filling the gaps.. content indexing of docx and other Office formats is easy to resolve; I have New entries for Office file types - why not the Preview Pane? Guess it's not of so much interest..

From what I can remember you only get the preview pane handlers in MS Office.

I remember using MS Office Free Starter Edition and getting previews but it doesn't work on Windows 10.

FYI:

I've used:
Apache OpenOfice
LibreOffice
JartePlus
SSOffice
KingsoftOffice (old)
WPSOffice
MobiSystems Office

None of them included a preview handler.