Support For Preview Of Word and Excel Files (in Preview Pane)

Ideas for improvements and requests for new features in XnView MP

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freecicero
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Joined: Tue Jul 18, 2017 9:47 pm

Support For Preview Of Word and Excel Files (in Preview Pane)

Post by freecicero »

I see this question has been raised in the distant past in links such as those below, but not recently as far as I can tell.

Use of XNVIEWMP is SO CLOSE to being one of the best file managers in the Linux world - it may already exceed them in most respects. What I have really been looking for in linux is the ability to scroll through a list of files and see a preview on the right of my screen, as happens nowadays with Windows Explorer. We can now do that with XNVIEW MP with graphics files, and with PDF files - the only major office file types missing are EXCEL and WORD.

Is there any hope for those of us who would dearly love this feature? With the existing ability to have a favorites pane, a folder tree pane, and a categories pane, XNVIEWMP instantly is (already is) the most flexible working environment in Linux. Any way to nudge it just a little further?

thanks in advance....



http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?t=19589

http://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?t=11980
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m.Th.
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Re: Support For Preview Of Word and Excel Files (in Preview Pane)

Post by m.Th. »

I really understand you. However, you must understand that the communication protocol between Windows Explorer and embedded previews can be difficult to replicate, especially when we speak about a cross-platform program.

Besides that, this solution would only work on Windows.

So the only solution left is to reverse-engineer the DocX and XlsX formats. Ok, they aren't very hard because the documentation exists and, in fact, these files are just ZIP archives of XML files. However, it is hard enough to get this on the screen.

For reference see here:

http://wiki.qt.io/Handling_Microsoft_Word_file_format

https://forum.qt.io/topic/74254/how-to- ... iles-in-qt

...if we want only a Windows solution which NEEDS Word to be installed then the things are pretty simple:

http://forum.codecall.net/topic/72065-s ... -doc-file/

(same applies for Excel, PowerPoint and any other OLE server).

Perhaps this solution, with some polishing, can be interesting because it is a quick way to offer access to a lot of popular formats: the entire Office suite, InDesign, Quark, Corel etc.
m. Th.

- Dark Themed XnViewMP 1.6 64bit on Win11 x64 -
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