I've noticed many of my fellow Google Drive users, if they are not sure what a file is by its name, actually open the file from Drive in order to see what it is. However, this isn't necessary (or efficient). Google Drive has a file preview option. Allow me to show you.


How to preview a file

Here's what you will see:


Previewing a File in Google Drive

Preview works for just about any file type. These include:

  • Image files (.JPEG, .PNG, .GIF, .BMP)
  • Video files (WebM, .MPEG4, .3GPP, .MOV, .AVI, .MPEGPS, .WMV, .FLV, .ogg)
  • Text files (.TXT)
  • Markup/Code (.CSS, .HTML, .PHP, .C, .CPP, .H, .HPP, .JS)
  • Microsoft Word (.DOC and .DOCX)
  • Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
  • Microsoft PowerPoint (.PPT and .PPTX)
  • Adobe Portable Document Format (.PDF)
  • Apple Pages (.PAGES)
  • Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
  • Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
  • Tagged Image File Format (.TIFF) - best with RGB .TIFF images
  • Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
  • Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
  • PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
  • TrueType (.TTF)
  • XML Paper Specification (.XPS)
  • Archive file types (.ZIP, .RAR, tar, gzip)
  • Audio formats (MP3, MPEG, WAV, .ogg)
  • .MTS files
  • Raw Image formats

For more information, including the built-in features of preview, see Google's support page on previewing files.