Help and guides

Short answers to the things people actually ask. If yours is not here, email us and it will be.

Opening a file

Drag a file anywhere onto the page, or click the drop zone to pick one. That is the whole process. Nothing uploads, so there is no progress bar to wait through.

Three steps, and the tool does two of them: you drop it, it appears, and then you read it whichever way suits you.

Reading it your way

• Split view shows the finished result and the raw source side by side. Double-click the divider to recentre it.
• Find searches inside Markdown, text, code and JSON files. Spreadsheets and CSV files have their own filter box above the table, which hides the rows that do not match.
• Edit lets you change the text of a Markdown, code, CSV, HTML, SVG or JSX file and watch the preview update a moment after you stop typing. You can switch it to manual and press Run instead. Spreadsheet cells are edited straight in the table, and Word documents and PDFs are read only.
• Dark mode and the contrast slider are there for comfort. Dark mode is remembered until you change it. The contrast setting is remembered for a day, then goes back to normal.

What's inside: what it shows you

Files carry things that never appear on screen and travel with them when you send them. What's inside reads those parts and lists them.

It matters most in the moment just before you send something. A holiday photo can carry the exact coordinates of your home. A document someone forwarded you can still hold the previous author's comments about the person you are about to forward it to.

All of it is read on your device. We never look up a location, because doing that would tell a third party exactly where you were.

Getting a clean copy

Once What's inside has shown you what a file is carrying, Save a clean copy gives you the same file with those details removed. It works on photos (.jpg, .png, .webp), Word documents and Excel workbooks.

Nothing is re-encoded. A photo comes back with the identical pixels, its colour profile intact, and only the hidden block gone. If the photo was taken sideways, the one piece we put back is which way up it goes, so it does not come out rotated. A Word file keeps every word, table and heading, and loses the author, the company, who saved it last, how long it was worked on, comments, and the names attached to tracked changes.

What it will not do: remove a file embedded inside a Word document, remove comments attached to spreadsheet cells, or clean a PDF. The first two are reported to you at the time. For the PDF, cleaning it safely means rewriting the whole file, which needs a full PDF reader we deliberately do not load, so export a fresh PDF from the app that made it instead.

Save as: what it keeps, and what it cannot

Save as turns the Markdown you are viewing into a real Word or PDF document.

Kept: headings, bold and italic, ordered and unordered lists including nested ones, tables, block quotes, code blocks in a monospaced font, and links to a web address or an email address.

Not kept: exact fonts and page layout; images of any kind, which become their alt text, and ones hosted on the internet are deliberately never fetched; links that point inside the same document or at a file next to it, where the words stay but the link is removed and the tool tells you how many; and anything Markdown itself cannot express.

One thing worth knowing about the PDF: the built-in font does not include every symbol. Check marks, arrows and emoji can come out as an empty box. The tool warns you when it spots one, rather than letting you find out later.

When a file will not open

• An old .doc file. There is no maintained way to read Word's pre-2007 format in a browser. Open it in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice, save it as .docx, and drop that in instead. We will never quietly send it to a server to convert it for you.
• A PDF. This one is deliberate. Your device already opens PDFs perfectly well, so rather than draw one badly we show you what it is carrying. Drop one and see.
• A file over 25 MB. The limit is there so a huge file cannot freeze your tab.
• Something we do not recognise yet. Tell us what it was. The format list grows from those messages.

Checking your file is not uploaded

You do not have to trust the claim, and here is exactly what you will see if you check. Open your browser's developer tools, go to the network tab, then drop a file.

You will see a few open source libraries load from public code networks: marked and highlight.js for Markdown and code, React and Babel for JSX. Some arrive as the home page demo plays, the rest when a file needs them. Those networks learn that someone opened a file of that kind, never the file itself. You will also see one short anonymous count go to our own server, recording the file type, a rough size band, whether it displayed correctly, and which buttons you pressed. Never a name and never any contents. It is switched off entirely if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.

What you will not see is your file, or anything that was inside it. It is read in the browser and never sent, and nothing What's inside finds is ever sent either. Everything that reads a file's hidden details, so Word, Excel, PDF and photo metadata, is served from previewany.com itself.

Still stuck

Email hello@previewany.com. A person reads it. If you are reporting a file that will not open, telling us which app produced it helps more than anything else you could say.

You may also want what PreviewAny does, or the home page to try something.