With this week’s release of Ready Room we bring you just one feature, but it’s one that's been frequently requested: file preview. Now it's possible view the contents of almost any file without having to download and open it! Wherever files are listed (with individual tasks, in the inspector view, and on storyboards) there are now two links: clicking the filename will bring up the preview in a dialog box, and clicking the “download” link will download the file as always.

List files

The preview works for most file types: MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), PDFs, images (JPG, PNG, TIFF.), and videos (MP4, MOV), as well as CSV, HTML, and text files. For zip files, no preview link will be provided, but files can still be downloaded and extracted. There are a few unavoidable quirks. The previewer is a Google product that works most reliably with Google’s Chrome browser, though it does work well with Firefox and Edge. On occasion, it may render a blank document, in which case closing and reopening the preview generally works. And while it does a very good job rendering MS Office files, complex documents may not be 100% faithful to the original.

Preview File

The Google viewer provides controls for zooming and pagination. In addition, you can open the preview in a new tab, which will then let you open the file in Google Docs, save it to Google Drive, download it locally, or print it. We hope you find this new feature useful. As always, we value your feedback.