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[ Go to April 1997 Table of Contents ]
WinLab Reviews
-- by James E. Powell
Question: How do you view a file when you don't have an application for the file's format? Answer: With Quick View Plus. In its latest release, Quick View Plus supports 200 file formats and adds the ability to print a file with a right-mouse click from within Explorer or many common dialog boxes, such as File/Open. This speedy utility does the job much more quickly than opening the applications that create files and then printing. It had no trouble displaying a Word file that had both a BMP file pasted into it and an embedded Excel chart. You'll find welcome support for sophisticated spreadsheet features, such as text wrapping within cells, as well as for columns, headers, footers and page numbers within word processing files. Although the documents print properly, you won't see those advanced features displayed unless you select Preview mode. You can set Quick View Plus to work in tandem with Win95's Explorer by attaching it to the side or bottom of an Explorer window. To view files, simply drag and drop them from Explorer to Quick View. An icon in the Quick View Plus window lets you open the file's associated application (if you have it) for editing. Within the Quick View window, you can zoom in and out, change the view (from text to hex, for example), and search for words within text-based documents. Using ActiveX, Version 4.0 merges its menus with those of Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0. Inso says the new release integrates with Microsoft Exchange (for viewing file attachments) and Lotus Notes 4, but I did not test those features. Extensive file format support covers legacy word processors, spreadsheets, databases, presentation packages and dozens of graphics formats. Quick View Plus still isn't as up-to-date as I'd expect-it supports Access 2.0 but not Access 7, which has been available for over a year. Also missing: Windows HLP files. One feature I really liked was the ability to click on a zipped file, see the contents in a hierarchy, then click again to view the file without unzipping it. Microsoft Binder and LZH-compressed files are also supported. With such wide file format support and quick performance, Quick View Plus finds a place on our Recommended List. When "pinned" to Explorer, Quick View Plus lets you view or print files by dragging and dropping them to its window. From Quick View Plus you can launch an application to edit the selected file.
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