[FIX] This File Cannot Be Previewed Because There Is No Previewer Installed For It

Microsoft recently released Office 2016 to end users. If you can’t make clean install of Office 2016, then see this fix. Well, if you’re on Click-to-Run based installation of Office 2013, you can directly upgrade your installation to Office 2016 by checking for new updates. However, as usual, users who’re are upgrading have some issues thereafter update is done. There is a known issue which has been reported by many users and it’s related to previewing one Office application file in another application.

For example, when you try to preview Excel files from Outlook 2016, you get following warning:

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

For you, this problem may that Word previewer is not working from PowerPoint or vice versa. The root cause of this problem is mainly damaged registry configuration. During upgrade, it may possible that registry keys maintaining this functionality of Office apps have became corrupted. So in order to fix this problem, we have to correctly align those registry keys. You can try these steps for that:

FIX : This File Cannot Be Previewed Because There Is No Previewer Installed For It

1. Press + R and put regedit in Run dialog box to open Registry Editor (if you’re not familiar with Registry Editor, then click here). Click OK.

2. In the left pane of Registry Editor, navigate to following registry keys based upon the way you’ve installed Office.

If you’re on Click-to-Run based installation, go to this registry key:

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

If you’re on Volume license/MSI/setup based installation, and using 32-bit Office on 64-bit Windows, go here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\​SOFTWARE\​Wow6432Node\​Microsoft\​Windows\​CurrentVersion\​PreviewHandlers

If you’re on Volume license/MSI/setup based installation, and using 32-bit Office on 32-bit Windows, locate this registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\​SOFTWARE\​Microsoft\​Windows\​CurrentVersion\​PreviewHandlers

3. In the right pane of registry location adopted in step 2, look for the following registry strings and make sure that they have the correct corresponding Value data:

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

Registry string: {65235197-874B-4A07-BDC5-E65EA825B718}
Value data : Microsoft PowerPoint previewer

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

Registry string: {00020827-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
Value data: Microsoft Excel previewer

If any of the registry string don’t have the same data as mentioned above, do a double click on the string and modify its Value data and set correct one:

4. Once you corrected and verified all the registry strings mentioned in previous step, close Registry Editor and reboot. After restarting the machine, problem would be resolved.

Hope this helps! Go here to review new features of Office 2016.