Outlook 2016: Excel files won’t preview

Users who were upgraded to Office 2016 have discovered they can’t preview Excel files in Outlook’s reading pane. When they select an Excel attachment, they receive the following error message:

This file cannot be previewed because there is no previewer installed for it.

This is due to an incorrect registry entry for the preview handler. While this will be fixed in a future update, you can fix it now by adding the following values to the registry.

The correct registry keys for a click to run installation (which covers most users) are:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY\MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PreviewHandlers

REG_SZ: {21E17C2F-AD3A-4b89-841F-09CFE02D16B7}
Value: Microsoft Visio previewer

REG_SZ: {65235197-874B-4A07-BDC5-E65EA825B718}
Value: Microsoft PowerPoint previewer

REG_SZ: {84F66100-FF7C-4fb4-B0C0-02CD7FB668FE}
Value: Microsoft Word previewer

REG_SZ: {00020827-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
Value: Microsoft Excel Previewer

Or, just run this registry file to add the values to your registry.

Volume license / MSI

If you are using the volume license "MSI" or installed Office using the version supplied in an MSDN subscription, the keys you need to change are as follows.

If you use 64bit Windows & 32bit Office, the key is
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PreviewHandlers

If your Windows and Office are both 32 or both 64bit, use this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PreviewHandlers

The string values remain the same for both.

REG_SZ: {21E17C2F-AD3A-4b89-841F-09CFE02D16B7}
Value: Microsoft Visio previewer

REG_SZ: {65235197-874B-4A07-BDC5-E65EA825B718}
Value: Microsoft PowerPoint previewer

REG_SZ: {84F66100-FF7C-4fb4-B0C0-02CD7FB668FE}
Value: Microsoft Word previewer

REG_SZ: {00020827-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
Value: Microsoft Excel Previewer

Published September 30, 2015. Last updated on June 5, 2017.

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