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Create a Thumbnail of Microsoft Office Documents when You save it

By default Office document like word and excel take the standard icon ( I mean the word icon which represent the word document) but if you want to get a cute little preview , like the images get and you can visualize what they look like before you can open it.

Thumbnail Preview of Office Document

Thumbnail Preview of Office Document

You can not see whats stored in document completely with this but it can tell if  documents first page is filled in or not. The image on the right is exactly what I am talking about. I tried this with Microsoft Office 2007 version.

How do I save it as Thumbnail ?

Its simple. You should get this option either when you save it for the first time or when you do save as. Look for Save Thumbnail option there. As soon as you save it you would get the preview exactly like the image on the top.

Save option for Thumbnail

Save option for Thumbnail

If you see closely here, this is the right place even to add authors and tags to the file. You need not to hunt places for it. Just make it a habbit of tagging it.

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Posted on 4th October 2008 by Ashish Mohta , A tech blogger who writes about solving day to day problems of people who use computer. He also writes on How to use the applications like Office, PC tips, Online tools,Browsers and more. All posts by Ashish Mohta | Connect with me @ Twitter | Linkedin | Facebook | Stumble | Need more help? Ask your Questions at our Support Center

3 Comments »

  • Ajay Pathak said:

    is this options is available with windows vista or office 2007 because i am not able to see this option on my windows xp computer

  • Ashish Mohta (author) said:

    If you are using Office 2007 on Xp and cant see then it could be a feature of Vista then. I dont have XP any more to test it.

  • Jacob Carstens said:

    It appears to be harder to find in Windows XP:

    In office 2007 on XP, you need to select it as an option in the “document properties” window. The button to activate that window is not available in the default configuration, so you need to add the “properties” button by customizing the toolbars first, then click the button and select “advanced” to get to the “save thumbnail” option.
    It sounds like a joke, but this is how to do it. Only about 10 mouse clicks and two minutes time…
    In office 2000 on xp the “properties” dialog is available in the files menu, and the thumbnail option not hidden behind an “advanced” button, making the operation a lot simpler.
    There is no documented option to save thumbnails pr. default in all documents as far as I can tell. Please do correct me if I’m wrong.
    On a more rambling sidenote: OpenOffice saves thumbnails by default on all documents, and find it hard to imagine why Microsoft would choose to omit this feature. Backwards compatibility or just backwards thinking?

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