This application known as Universal Viewer, renders an awesome ability to your system, using which you can view almost every type of file using one single application. Lets take 2 situations to understand it better.
# Situation 1
Lets say you have lot of images in one folder. If I want to see a preview of all the images one after the other its easy. I just open the windows image viewer and keep clicking on next and see all of them. Easy.
# Situation 2
Now lets say you have a folder which has mixed content i.e. contains Video and Image files both. Now if you want to preview of both image and movie files one after the other it is just not possible.
Situation 2 is what is solved with Universal Viewer. You can just keep on moving to next file and you would get a preview of it. In fact with MP3 and Video files you can see it also running.
How Universal Viewer works ?
This application, actually exploits the dedicated applications installed for particular file type of file on your system. So technically it’s an arrangement to open all the applications in one new application window, in spite of opening them in their traditional way.
Let’s have a look at its working, using the folder ‘Test’, a folder with several types of files MP3,PDF,SWF,JPG,GIF, and TXT.
Now let us have a look at the Universal Viewer snapshots, which shows the preview for each file type.
Gif file in Universal Viewer
JPG , MPG, MP3 and PDF files in Universal Viewer
Now since we know how the application works , let us now try to understand what are the options, navigation etc available within the tool itself.
#1 Navigation
This can be done using Left and Right Arrow on toolbar. It has zoom in and out options with full screen support. Take a look at the image for better understanding.
#2 Plugin Support
You can also customize this toolbar as per your choice. Option, to download additional plugins and install them in order to have an additional file support for other file types is also there. Basically even if you don’t have the application installed still using the plugin you can view the files Here is a list of of the plugins
Office files viewers
- Office
- Excellence
- OpenOffice.org HTML Viewer
- OpenOffice.org Simple Viewer
- ListDoc – MS Word documents (DOC)
- PDFView – Adobe Acrobat documents (PDF)
Graphic viewers
- Imagine – All major graphic formats (JPG GIF BMP PNG TGA …)
- SGViewer – All major graphic formats (JPG GIF BMP PNG TGA …)
- ICLView – Icon files (ICO ICL EXE DLL …)
- FlashView – Flash clips (SWF)
- SWF Lister – Flash clips (SWF FLV)
- 2D CAD View – Vector graphics: AutoCAD etc (DXF DWG HPGL SVG CGM …)
Text editors with syntax highlighting
- SynPlus
- Syn
Font viewers
- TTFViewer – TrueType fonts (TTF)
- Font – All major font formats (TTF TTC OTF FON PFM)
Miscellaneous viewers
- xBaseView – All major database formats (DBF DBC DB MDB MDF XLS CSV TAB BDE UDL DSN …)
- LinkInfo – Windows link files (LNK)
- FileInfo – Applications and DLLs (EXE DLL SCR …)
- PE Viewer – Applications and DLLs (EXE DLL SCR …)
- AnyTag – Audio clips (AAC APE FLAC MP3 MP4 MPC OFR OGG WMA …)
- TxQuickView – Multi-purpose: images, media, internet, executables, fonts (AVI MPG MP3 RA RM MOV HTML EXE DLL TTF …)
- NFO View – NFO text files (NFO)
Conclusion on Universal Viewer
Universal Viewer is extremely helpful in scenarios where you are
- Interested in only previewing the files, for sorting them.
- Trying to search a file in a folder which has resembling file names.
- A situation where you only remember the content of file, and you don’t have the idea about the file name.
So next time when you come across a file, and the file extension sounds alien to your computer, before trying to find out the application for it, give a try to Universal Viewer. Download Universal Viewer
