Preview Google Docs Directly in Gmail

Gmail let’s you preview pictures, YouTube videos, Picasa Albums, and Flickr Albums. It doesn’t stop there, now you can also preview Google document attachments directly in Gmail. No need to download to your hard drive and open documents you might not even need to keep. Gmail Labs lets you sneak a peak right in the message it was attached to.

Gmail will not automatically show you previews, you have to go into the Labs section from your Gmail account.

After selecting ‘Enable’, save your changes and next time someone attaches a Google document to an email, you will be able to preview the contents of the file easily.

I haven’t received a Google Docs attachment yet today, since enabling the preview function on my account, but Google posted an image of what you can expect to see when you do on the Gmail Blog:

I’d love to get some feedback in the comments when you use the feature. Is it really as useful as a picture preview, or YouTube preview?