The Little Things – Quick Look’s Excel Support
Excel is one of the Windows programs that I use often, primarily to track student grades and write reports. It’s an industry standard and, in my opinion, one of Microsoft’s finest products. And while many Mac users might feel puzzled at the near ubiquity of Windows computers, Excel is a product that deserves the prestige that it commands in both the business and education world.
With such wide spread use my little discovery shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it struck me as noteworthy that Quick Look, Leopard’s utility for grabbing a fast, read only glance at documents and pictures without opening them in their parent application, should have support for Excel documents with multiple spreadsheets. To me this is representative of Apple’s tendency to anticipate future uses of their operating system – even with competitor’s applications – and support them natively.
When Quick Look first appeared in Leopard, I think many people had some difficulty utilizing it, primarily because of the years of muscle memory attached to double clicking a file to open it when you couldn’t decide what it was. But Quick Look is a powerful little utility, and training yourself to hit the space bar with a selected file rather than double clicking will ultimately save you a ton of time, especially if you work with Microsoft Office documents (Office is a powerful suite of apps, but apparently with that power comes a frustratingly slow load time – Quick Look negates that).
So, next time you want to preview a document, try hitting the space bar. You might be surprised about what Apple’s little utility can do.
