3/5/2008 -- Within Windows Explorer in Vista, you can adjust the view to large icons -- or even extra-large icons -- from the Views menu. However, you can't really read the contents of a Word document or select and copy data because such a small thumbnail preview only gives you a hint of what the content may be; it's not meant for actually reading the content. In the case of a photograph, the extra-large or even large icon is much more useful.

In order to view as much information as possible, I suggest you enable all three panes -- Preview, Details and Navigation -- in Windows Explorer. These can be enabled by clicking on Organize, Layout. You won't see a check mark next to them, but they toggle between enable and disable. (By the way, you can click and drag the dividers between the various panes to view more or less content.)

The Preview pane is a new option in Vista that lets you view the contents of a file without opening it. This is true for documents as well as pictures. The Preview pane will work for any application that supports this feature; for example, it will work with Office 2007 applications, .PDF files, JPEGs, GIFs, HTML files, Windows Media Audio/Video files, etc. The Preview pane is a great feature because it's so much faster to preview the documents in Windows Explorer rather than loading them in Word or PowerPoint.

When working with documents, such as Microsoft Word, you can select individual text and then copy it. You can even perform these functions in a zipped file without extracting the file.

Note that while you can copy from a document in Preview pane, you can't paste text into a document. Preview pane is a viewer, not an editor.

Incidentally, I discovered an interesting "feature" while working with Preview pane. When I previewed a Word 2007 document that contained a logo, I was only able to see the text but not the logo. However, if I clicked anywhere inside the document, the logo became visible.