michal-ruzicka/TCOfficeView v2.3.0

Release v2.3.0

on GitHub

[v2.3.0] – 2026-05-28

Full-mode preview for all Office apps is now fully interactive and much
more reliable. Rapid Ctrl+Q/F3 browsing among Office files no longer
triggers a wave of cold-starts if full mode is used.

Upgrading from an earlier version? Total Commander keeps an
already-configured detect string when a plugin is replaced, so
users coming from v2.1.0 or earlier won't automatically pick up
the new universal file-type support — see
Upgrading from an Earlier Version in README.md.

Added

• Word, Excel and PowerPoint full mode are now fully interactive and much
  more reliable.
  Full-mode previews used to render almost correctly but especially in Excel
  clicking, scrolling and ribbon buttons did not work always correctly.
  All three apps now behave like normal read-only Office windows. Achieving
  this required re-architecting all three from window embedding to a
  top-level overlay — see Changed below. The → Quick button still
  works as before.
• Configurable dwell-time before starting an Office application
  ([Mode] FullLoadDelayMs, default 1000 ms). The delay prevents
  rapid arrow-key browsing from triggering a wave of expensive Office
  cold-starts. It works differently by mode:
  • full / full-switchable — the Office launch is deferred from
    initial navigation; if the user moves on within the dwell window
    the launch is cancelled entirely and Office is never touched.
  • quick-switchable (the default) — quick mode runs immediately
    (no delay) and succeeds for ordinary Office files. The delay
    kicks in only when the quick handler fails and auto-fallback to
    full mode would fire — which in practice means SharePoint
    documents synced from a non-primary Microsoft 365 tenant. For
    those files "Preview is loading…" is shown during the dwell
    window; the mode-switch button is hidden. Moving to another file
    within that window cancels the Office launch. Files that load
    fine in quick mode are completely unaffected.
    Set to 0 to disable and load immediately (restores pre-dwell-time
    behaviour). The delay never applies to the → Full mode-switch
    button — that always loads immediately.

Changed

• All three Office apps re-architected from window embedding to a
  top-level overlay. Word, Excel and PowerPoint full mode all used to
  embed the real Office window — reparent it as a child of the Lister
  pane. All three are now kept as a borderless top-level window floated
  over the pane. This is the only way to make them foreground-capable,
  and therefore interactive (especially very important for Excel windows);
  a reparented child of another process can never take the foreground, which
  is why the embedded versions were limited in some functionality.

  Behavioural consequences worth knowing:

  • The preview is live only while Total Commander is the front window.
    Switch to another application and the pane shows a frozen snapshot
    of the last Office state (still readable) until you switch back.
  • Modern Office apps draw their own title bar, so the Close button is
    present even on a frameless window; closing the preview that way tears
    it down and shows a "Full preview was closed." message instead of a
    blank pane.
  • The grey close-guard strip that used to cover the top of
    Word/Excel/PowerPoint full previews is gone — it was needed only to
    intercept the close button on embedded windows (resulting in closing
    lister [when F3 was used] or even whole Total Commander window [when
    Ctrl+Q was used]), and is not needed in the overlay model.
  • A "Preview is loading…" indicator appears for full preview mode.

• Mark-of-the-Web blocking enforced in full mode.
  Files opened via OLE Automation do not trigger Office's Protected View
  pipeline — the application trusts its COM caller and opens the file
  without the "Enable Editing" quarantine banner, bypassing the
  security control MOTW is meant to enforce. TCOfficeView now applies
  its own MOTW check before launching any Office full-mode load: if
  the file is MOTW-blocked (Internet or Restricted zone), the Unblock
  fallback panel is shown instead of starting Office. After clicking
  Unblock this file the preview reloads in full mode as normal.
  Quick and auto-fallback paths are unchanged.

• Unblock button made simpler on the MOTW info page.

Fixed

• Rapid switching between Office files no longer triggers a load for
  every file flicked past. Two complementary debounce mechanisms now
  work together: a dwell-time timer (see FullLoadDelayMs above) prevents
  the Office cold-start from starting at all for files you navigate through
  quickly, and a message-queue trailing-edge filter skips queued LOAD
  requests when a newer one is already waiting — so only the file you
  actually land on gets rendered. This also applies to the auto-fallback
  path for SharePoint cross-tenant documents (which previously could trigger
  Office cold-starts even on files the user had already left).