On the same day it released a new Android app, Google on Wednesday announced that Google Drive has received a new preview feature. You can now quickly preview more than 30 file types and flip between files until you find the one you want. If you don’t see the feature yet, don’t worry: Google says it’s being rolled out gradually “over the next few days.”
After your Google Drive get the feature, the preview window will automatically show up for documents, audio files, and video clips. Once it does, you can click on the side arrows to flip to other files, view pictures, watch video files, scroll through multi-page documents, and even zoom in to see a file in more detail.
Here’s how it looks:
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Since Drive is all about file management, you can also share, download, print, or open a file for editing with just one click. The best part, however, is that you can select and copy text from the preview (Microsoft Word documents and PDFs included).
The text selection is pretty spiffy:
If you’re wondering about the file types, they’re all the ones that Google Drive already supports:
- Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .TIFF, .BMP)
- Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV)
- Text files (.TXT)
- Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)
- Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
- Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
- Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
- Apple Pages (.PAGES)
- Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
- Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
- Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF)
- Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
- Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
- PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
- TrueType (.TTF)
- XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
- Archive file types (.ZIP and .RAR)
The update is a welcome addition for a cloud storage service. Most people aren’t too crazy about looking at lists of files, although that’s usually the most efficient way to go about things. If you’re a more visual person, or you’re dealing content in multiple files that needs to be looked at first, this one is for you.
See also – Google Drive’s Create menu now lets you add and access third-party, Drive-enabled apps and Google Drive now lets developers share hosted websites by storing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files
Image credit: Armin Hanisch
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