Is there any quicklook plugin to improve Microsoft Office files

[mat1696]

Hi everyone,
Very surprised to see that nobody asked that earlier: Quicklook on macOS works with Microsoft Office files, but Word files look really basic via Quicklook. Are you aware of any plugin to improve the way these files look ?

 

[fisherking]

what aren't you seeing? i don't use office, but my business partner does, and all her word files seem to preview correctly in quicklook...

 

[usagora]

Ok, I'm confused. You said they look "great", but surely that's not what you meant, in light your final sentence? Also, what do you mean by they look "basic"? Quick Look, after all is just for that - a quick look at the file's contents. I'ts not meant to show the file exactly how it's formatted in the native app. For instance, I notice table borders don't show up in Quick Look nor do custom fonts, etc.

 

[mat1696]

what aren't you seeing? i don't use office, but my business partner does, and all her word files seem to preview correctly in quicklook...

For example can see here a comparison between the Quicklook Preview and how it looks in MS Word:

And with documents with complex layout, it's generally very different in Quicklook and Word (fonts are different, images are not at the same place, some title don't appear correcty, ...). In fact from what I know, Quicklook generate an RTF file for Office Documents (it uses the same rendering as if you open MS Office docs in TextEdit), so that's why... And I find it quite annoying...

Out of curiosity, what other software do you use @fisherking instead of Office? iWork?

 

[mat1696]

Ok, I'm confused. You said they look "great", but surely that's not what you meant, in light your final sentence? Also, what do you mean by they look "basic"? Quick Look, after all is just for that - a quick look at the file's contents. I'ts not meant to show the file exactly how it's formatted in the native app. For instance, I notice table borders don't show up in Quick Look nor do custom fonts, etc.

Oh my mistake! Of course I wanted to say they don't look great.

 

[usagora]

Again, Quick Look isn't meant to look "great" as in an exact replica of the document. It does show basic formatting (bold, italics, underline, and color, for instance), but not other formatting, such as text highlight/background color. See sample below (Word on left, Quick Look on right). Notice also that Quick Look defaults to a serif font:

Why is it important to you that Quick Look look 100% like the original document?

 

[mat1696]

Why is it important to you that Quick Look look 100% like the original document?

Because generally when I just want to have a... quick look at a document it's easier and faster to do it using the space bar than opening the whole file which can take a while as Word is very laggy on quite old hardware... And with some documents with complex page layout it makes them unreadable. Of course Microsoft could provide a Quicklook extension so that MS Word files could look correctly (like iWork files) but I'm sure they won't. So that's why I'm wondering whether a 3rd-party solution exists...

 

[usagora]

Because generally when I just want to have a... quick look at a document it's easier and faster to do it using the space bar than opening the whole file which can take a while as Word is very laggy on quite old hardware... And with some documents with complex page layout it makes them unreadable. Of course Microsoft could provide a Quicklook extension so that MS Word files could look correctly (like iWork files) but I'm sure they won't. So that's why I'm wondering whether a 3rd-party solution exists...

The example you provided in post #4 is definitely not "unreadable". Do you have an example of one that's unreadable (e.g. text is overlapping or something)? I haven't seen that in my personal experience.

 

[fisherking]

Out of curiosity, what other software do you use @fisherking instead of Office? iWork?

i use pages regularly (but am doing very basic stuff there), and open spreadsheets in numbers (which i do one every decade 🤣).