Preview Pane was one of the dozens of new features introduced in Vista. It’s one thing I loved in Windows Vista and use regularly even on Windows Seven. Yet it has managed to remain almost unnoticed and even regular users of Vista may not be aware of it.

Activating the preview pane is really simple – just press Alt+P while using the Windows Explorer. The preview pane allows you to get a quick idea about the content of the file without even opening it. It allows you to read text files, listen to audios and preview videos and preview documents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with all files. It won’t work for .mkv files even if you have the proper codecs installed. Similarly, you can’t preview .nfo files although they are just text files.

Luckily for us, the folks behind WinHelpOnline have released a simple tool called PreviewConfig that makes adding new formats to Preview Pane dead simple. It doesn’t even require installation (portable software). When you launch PreviewConfig it will display all the currently registered file formats. Adding a new file type is as simple as entering the extension and selecting the Preview Type (text, media file and other).

PreviewConfig is a nice utility that works really well if you have a lot of unorthodox file formats in your system. Unfortunately, Windows Seven users are out of luck as PreviewConfig currently supports only Windows Vista. If you are using Vista give it a try and let us know if you found it useful.

[Download PreviewConfig]