Some users suddenly complain that their pdf previews have stopped working in their windows explorer – even though Word and Excel documents continue to work in the preview pane (as they have their own container processes). Well – we know it’s a Microsoft update that’s causing this – so tried many suggested online methods – only one method worked – and even AI didn’t pick it up.
This symptom affects internet based files – in this case, SharePoint folders and files that were saved onto the local PC drive already – so not just listed as cloud based files (they won’t preview anyway). To override this security feature – please do it advisedly – but moaning users rarely reconsider so here goes:
Open up PowerShell on the computer and type in the following command – replace the “folder location” with the drive path (but keep the “” symbols) having the issue:
Get-ChildItem -Path “folder location” -Recurse | Unblock-File
PDF preview works again.
