Adding thumbnail or preview image for Word, Excel or PowerPoint Office documents is easy, though you won’t find the choice anywhere obvious. We’ll dig into how thumbnails work for some nerdy extra detail. Thumbnails are the small images that appear in File Explorer instead of the standard icons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.

If you already have Word 2016 open, you can view the templates by clicking the File tab, then going to New. You can then see the templates just as you did on the start screen. As you can see, the blank document template appears first, followed by a tour of Word 2016.

Microsoft used to call them preview images. Saving Thumbnails for all Office documents You won’t find the ‘Save Thumbnails for all documents’ option anywhere obvious. It’s not in File Options where you’d expect it to be.

It’s hiding at File Info Properties Advanced Properties Summary Save Thumbnails for all Documents. Down the bottom of the Summary dialog is the option ‘Save Thumbnails for all Documents’. In PowerPoint the same option is called ‘Save preview picture’.

Hang on, I hear you cry! All these settings are document properties, Office says so, not overall settings for Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

You’re right, Advanced Properties is supposed to be settings and info for the current document only. The ‘Save Thumbnails ’ option is the exception. It seems to be a forgotten remnant of much earlier versions of Office. Microsoft has never bothered to move or duplicate this option to Options Save where it belongs. Save Thumbnail for single document To save a thumbnail for a single document, look on Save As dialog (not the ‘Save As’ or ‘Save a copy’ pane) for ‘Save Thumbnail’. We can’t see how to turn thumbnails on for an existing document without going to Save As.

Please if you can figure it out. What is saved as the thumbnail? Office saves the ‘first’ page of each document as the thumbnail Word: the first page of the document Excel: the visible/ selected worksheet when saved, using the view/zoom setting at that time.

PowerPoint: the first slide in the deck, the entire slide view. Under the hood When a thumbnail is saved, Office takes an image and saves it in the Word, Excel or PowerPoint document.

If you dig inside a modern Office document the thumbnail is at /docProps/Thumbnail.emf.EMF is the ‘Windows Metafile’ image format that’s still in use after over two decades. Windows Paint supports.emf images. You could tamper with thumbnail.emf inside an Office document, to insert an image which had no connection to the documents real contents.

However, Office would overwrite it with a proper thumbnail the next time the document was saved. The ‘Save Thumbnail’ setting is held in each Word document within the word /settings.xml file.

Look for The same setting in Excel and PowerPoint documents is less obvious. Which is a polite way of saying we could not find it!

Advertisement Microsoft Office has a lot of settings, but what it assigns by default might not be the best choice for you. Checkpoint vpn for mac high sierra. We’ll show you key default Office settings that you should customize to save time and be more efficient.

Some settings are available across Everyone knows what Microsoft Office is, right? Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote -- simple. What about Office Online, Office Mobile, Office 2016, and Office 365? The Office suite has become complex. We'll unravel it for., like customizing the features of the ribbon, while others are exclusive. We’ll look at some universal defaults, then tackle Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.

If you think there’s something we’ve missed from this list, please let us know in the comments below. Universal Some options are available across all (or the majority of) Office programs. Customize the Ribbon The ribbon is the bar that appears at the top and contains shortcuts and commands for the most common tasks. To customize it, go to File > Options > Customize Ribbon. On the left you will see all available commands, while the right shows your current configuration. Click an item on the left and then click Add >> to move it to the right. You can click the plus signs to expand the categories and get further customization on what is included.

For full information on this process, check our Do you often search for menu items in Microsoft Office? It's time to re-arrange and customize the Ribbon menu for your personal needs. You'll be surprised how flexible and easy it is! Save Location If you usually save your files in the same location, you should adjust the default file path. To do this, go to File > Options > Save and look for the Save documents section. First, tick Save to Computer by default.

Next, on Default local file location click Browse and navigate to the path you desire. Then click OK twice. Number of Worksheets Past versions of Excel always had three blank worksheets available by default when creating a new spreadsheet.