I was excited to get the RTM of Office 2016 but dismayed that the Excel preview function did not work in Outlook 2016.

Other previews were fine, like PDF and Word.

I figured there must be a problem with the way that Excel 2016 was registered and tried a “Repair” and reboot but that did not help. Firing up Process Monitor showed the problem pretty quickly. The registry key for the Excel Preview handler is not the same as the other working handlers. In RegEdit browse to:

HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY \MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PreviewHandlers 

In fact, the directory the key is pointing to does not exist (I have the 32bit installation). So, I deleted the key and recreated it with the same GUID {00020827-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} as a String type and just added “Microsoft Excel previewer”. Still under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\REGISTRY \MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\PreviewHandlers

And now my Previews work: