If you’re a sort junkie, then you might find this new feature of Vista’s Windows Explorer a handy one. The new Preview Pane allows you to preview the contents of the more common files and documents that you have in your computer. You get instant preview (and not that wee pansy of a thumbnail but a sizable one) of documents (Office documents) and media files.

The Preview Pane is one of the Vista Windows Explorer’s new but quite obscured feature. Using it is quite easy. All you have to do is to click on Organize -> Layout -> Preview Pane.

The Preview Pane will be located at the right side of the Explorer window. Clicking on a document file (like a Word document) will effectively launch a text preview. Like this one:

One of the possible drawbacks of having the preview pane is probably a lag on slower machines. Still, this beats having to launch an application that will let you view the documents contents.

To hid the Preview Pane just follow the same steps and disable the pane option.