Dropbox to get document preview feature. Early access sign ups available

Whenever Dropbox makes an announcement every tech blog under the sun writes a story about it. Even if no one or barely anyone got access to those new features firs thand. The popular file synchronization and cloud hosting provider Dropbox is preparing its business for the next years. One corner stone is the expansion of what it is offering its users.

The company recently acquired the photo management service Snapjoy and the music streaming service Audiogalaxy which will certainly be integrated in one way or the other into a future version of Dropbox.

One area where Dropbox is lacking currently is document management. The website offers no document editing capabilities right now, even previews of document formats are not possible. If you are on a public computer and need to find a particular document hosted on your account, you need to download each document to preview it locally.

This will be a thing of the past when Dropbox launches its document preview feature in the near future. While this initial version is not comparable to Google Docs or Microsoft's SkyDrive yet, it makes available a much requested feature.

From what we know, Dropbox will offer previews for pdf documents, certain Office files like docx and pptx (no Excel, no Open Document format) and plain text files that include programming language files for Python for example.

Dropbox has created a sign up form on its website for users who want to get early access to the new feature. Just visit the web page on the Dropbox website, sign in to your account if you have not done so already, and click on the button for early access. It may take a while before you get access as you are added to a queue.

The document preview feature is only one of the two new features that Dropbox highlighted two days ago. Another new feature that it demonstrated during the conference is virtual photo folders. It basically enables you to create photo albums using photos that are stored in different folders in the account. Sharing of photos that reside in different folders will also be made possible because of this.

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