Many using Vista would not be aware of this feature as its not enabled by default in Vista’s Windows Explorer. This is one of the excellent features that once you use it, you may end up using it all the time 
So, what is this Preview Pane ? – Yes, you guessed it, its used to preview your contents 
Lets see in action. First , to enable, open your windows explorer and on the top, select Organize and then Layout and choose Preview Pane
Once you select the above, you may see your explorer split into two parts and on the right hand side, you can now see something called Preview Pane
Now, let me select a picture and see what does the Preview Pane has for me
You can see the picture on your preview pane as a preview
Hey, I have a powerpoint presentation, what about that ? – No worries 
You can preview all slides and navigate too
Word document ?
Here too, you can preview all pages in the document
What about music ?
Movies ?
Hey, I think I forgot about PDF ! What about them ?
For the PDF preview to work, you have to have Adobe Reader installed though
The preview works with most of the common file types and also if you have the default program installed for a file type, the preview pane will pick it up (mostly, but it works )
Overall, its really handy feature
Ever since I got Word 2007 with Vista, over a year ago, my preview pane has refused to preview doc files. (The pane says “No preview available.” for doc files, though it works correctly for pictures.) Before that, the preview pane worked fine for doc files. How can I fix it?? Your reply will be most appreciated!
It doesn’t work for me on Excel, Word, PowerPoint, JPG, GIF, or BMP files. About the only files I can preview are Text and PDF.
Doesn’t work for me with .doc files and adobe pdf.
On my laptop which has foxit pdf reader installed it shows pdf items perfectly.
Any ideas?