What to Do When Outlook File Cannot Be Previewed?

You have just received an email with some attachments and none of them are opening when you are trying to do so. Are you also facing this issue? Well, if yes, then we are going to write this blog targeting this issue and provide you the best solution.

Fix the error ‘This file cannot be previewed’

If you are not able to open and preview the attachments, try these fixes.

• Check if you have the right app

  Any file or item you receive as an attachment in an email, cannot open on its own. For example, to open a spreadsheet, you require Excel; to open a doc file, you require Word; to open PDF, you will require Adobe Reader; and so on. If you are unable to open a file or attachment, check if you have the right app to open it. So, make sure that you have a the correct application installed on your system to open the attachment.

• Try fixing Windows Registry Settings

  It might also be the case that you are able to preview all the other files but not Microsoft Office files. You might not be able to open MS Word, MS Excel, MS Visio, and other Microsoft Office files. This may happen because there is no previewer installed which is not allowing Outlook to preview Microsoft Office files. Once this issue is fixed, try opening attachments again. They should be opening now.

• Check Attachment Handling Settings

  Another reason why you might not be able to open and preview attachment files is due to improper settings. You might need to check Attachment Handling Settings in the Trust Center. Let us start:

  1. Run Outlook on your system and click on the File tab once it is open.
  2. Now from the file menu, pick the Options category.
  3. In the Options Setting window, go to the Trust Center tab.
  4. In the Trust Center category, look for Trust Center Settings and open it.
  5. Now look for Attachment Handling
  6. It’s time to check if the box near “Turn off Attachment Preview” is not checked. If it is checked, uncheck it.
  7. Now, look for the “Attachment and Document Previewers…” option.
  8. Now, you need to check that the previewer that you want to use for previewing is checked.
  9. Finally, click on OK to finish the process.

  Once you perform all these steps successfully, you activate the previewer. Once the previewer is activated, you can easily open and view the attachments in Outlook.

• Enable Windows Firewall

  This error can also happen when Windows Fireball is not enabled on your system. To enable the Windows Firewall, follow the below-mentioned steps:

  1. On your system, click on the Start button and click on the Settings icon.
  2. Now look for Update & Security and click on it.
  3. Now, look for Windows Security and make a click.
  4. Now, you need to find Firewall & Network protection and select it.
  5. Now quickly choose a network profile and there you will find Windows Defender Firewall.
  6. Finally, turn the settings on for Windows Defender Firewall.

So, these were the quick fixes, you can try to preview the attachments of an Outlook email. However, this issue can occur due to corruption of PST files too. For PST corruption-related issues in Outlook, we recommend using Outlook PST Recovery. There are times when your PST might get corrupt and this may hamper all your work going on. To save yourself in such situations you can install this PST recovery tool on your system and with just a few clicks, your PST will be repaired. The tool comes with many benefits that helps you to totally customize the repairing process. It can repair multiple PST files at a time, integrates an automatic search option to search PST files in the specified system drive, previews repaired PST mailboxes content including metadata, allows making the selection of data with smart filter options, and propose multiple saving options including Office 365 cloud platform, more file formats like HTML, RTF, etc., email clients and webmail servers. It supports both protected/unprotected ANSI and UNICODE formats with all Outlook and Windows versions. The tool comes with a trial version with which a user can recover deleted PST file up to 25 items per folder with no issue at all.

Conclusion:

This blog is all about the issue of Outlook attachments not getting displayed for preview. So, we tried to provide the best possible fix for that issue. We have suggested a few setting changes that may help you to fix the problem. At last we have suggested what to do if you have a corrupt PST. Hope this blog helped you solve the issue.