Need help with QuickView for Office and PDF files

[granny]

First, let me say that I am a VERY happy FC user --- I keep discovering features and tricks, this is wonderful software!

FC QuickView displays beautifully my html, mht, text, videos, most graphic files, plays my music tracks. Is there a way to get it to show my Word, Excel, OpenOffice, and Pdf documents in the right-hand pane?

I have read at least 10 forum threads about QuickView, FileView, and using Lister plugins, and haven't had any luck finding a solution.

I'm on XP Pro SP2, using FC v 2007.10a installed and configured for portable use on my external usb hard-drive.
I installed / configured Office.wlx and Pdfview.wlx in both the Internal and External viewer configuration dialogs. (and am not happy that PdfView.wlx requires installation of 20 MB Ghostwriter-AFPL ---can't use the GPL version I already have!)

I tried installing the MS converter pack *.cnv files to the default directory C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\TextConv.
I tried placing the plugins and converter files in a "Plugins" folder in the FC directory, and then tried putting them all directly in the main FC directory alongside FreeCommander.exe.

When I try to use QuickView to display Word, Excel, OpenOffice *.odt or PDF documents in the right hand pane,
AND
when I use File View / File Edit (both the FC internal viewer, and when set up to use "external" ATViewer) ----

The pane or the "viewer" window displays "Web page unavailable offline", and then launches the associated app and opens the file in that.


This isn't what I was hoping for ---- if I wanted to open Excel or Word, I would just double-click to open the file normally. I want to just view the file, not edit it.

Am I misunderstanding how QuickView works?
Is this just the way FC operates, or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks in advance for any advice ---

granny

[ralfso]

The solution is only one forum-search away!
Did you try this?

Search for "quickview AND doc" and you'll get the link to:

http://forum.freecommander.com/viewtopi ... ckview+doc

[granny]

Hi ralfso, thank you for responding. I'm sorry to be so late getting back here, was out of town for a bit.


I'm sorry to say, the link you gave me is to the same plugins I already installed, as I said in my first post.

I wonder if it is the way the plugins are programmed.

I do NOT have MS Office or Adobe Reader on my own computer, and quickview doesn't work right.
I did install the newest converter pack from Microsoft, and now I can eventually get Word docs to show after about 3 seconds of flickering message boxes, but the document formatting is not displayed correctly. Exel won't display at all.

For pdf files, I get a message "Ghostwriter was unable to convert the document" and then my pdf reader (PDFX-change viewer) opens with the pdf file.



When I use a different computer that has Word, Excel, and Adobe installed, QuickView does work absolutely correctly even for pdf, and there is no Ghostwriter installed on this different computer even though the wlx plugin ReadMe says ghostwriter is required.


Is there anything else I can try to do to get it working on my pc?

[ralfso]

Hi Granny,

I don't know what converter pack from Microsoft you mean, but you can try the free wordviewer and excelviewer from microsoft.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

For PDF-Files I think that the PDFX-change viewer can be configured as default pdf-viewer so that it opens before ghostwriter, but the PDFs on my computer (Vista/Acrobat Reader) also open in a separate Acrobat Reader-window.

[granny]

Hi ralfso

I will try those viewers, thank you for the links.

The Microsoft Text Converter pack is the one that is required by the Lister plugin Office.wlx. I tried several ways to install the converters, according to the plugin ReadMe file.

On my home computer, I am running most of my software from an external usb drive, not from C:\Programs, and I think that is why the plugins act different there.
I do not have Word or Excel installed, and the office plugin will not display word or excel files in the QuickView pane.
I have PDFX-change installed on my external drive and configured as my default pdf reader, and pdf documents are not displayed in the QuickView pane, but instead PDFXchange opens and displays the pdf file.


On my WORK computer, Word, Excel, and Adobe are installed to C:\Programs. GhostScript is NOT installed.
With the office.wlx plugin installed, I try QuickView, and some kind of message box flickers very fast for a few seconds, and then the Word or Excel doc will display in FC QuickView pane.

With pdfview.wlx plugin installed, message says "unable to load Ghostscript" and then the pdf doc will display in FC QuickView pane.
Without pdfview.wlx installed, the pdf doc displays immediately in the Quickview pane.

So it kind of seems like QuickView will work for pdf files if Adobe is installed in C:\Programs, even with no plugin at all.

It also seems like the Office.wlx plugin will only work correctly if Word and Excel are actually installed in C:\Programs.

I'm just guessing, and I can't really test, because I can't install and uninstall programs on my work computer, and I don't own MS Office for my home computer.

Any thoughts?