Today, I’m very excited to announce a new feature we’ve added to Mammoth: the ability to preview nearly any document — you won’t need to download a file just to see what’s in it. This new feature works on your desktop and in the Mammoth mobile apps.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Drag in a file onto a Mammoth board
2. Click the preview icon (the “eye”)

See it in action:

What’s the benefit?

For one, you can see what’s in a file without having to download it, hunt the folder it got saved into and then open it. Previews help declutter your local folders, eliminate unnecessary downloads and save disk space. Especially useful for large files — no need to wait for the entire PDF or DOC to download when all you want to see is the first page — very relevant on a mobile device. Also handy when you don’t have the necessary software to open the file — I don’t have Illustrator, but I can view .ai files shared by our designer, in my freaking browser.

Super-lightweight Previewer

We spent a good amount of time thinking about this. Traditionally previewers are custom (think Scribd, SlideShare), living as tiny apps within a webpage. They need JS/iframes to run and in exchange give all sorts of nifty little gadgets and buttons.

The Mammoth previewer has none of that. Our goals were straightforward: load fast, on any device. After a few experiments, we came up with a solution: previews would be high quality images, arranged in a pure css gallery. You swipe, drag, scroll, touch. The previewer loads fast, scales easily and runs on every browser on every device.

Supported Formats

Nearly 80 document formats are previewable in Mammoth. From the everyday to the esoteric. Here’s a partial list:

Adobe Illustrator (ai)
Adobe Photoshop (psd)
Amazon Kindle (azw3)
Amazon Kindle eBook File (azw)
CorelDRAW Image File (cdr)
CSVs (csv)
PostScript (eps, ps)
Hasselblad 3F RAW Image (3fr)
Markdown (md)
Microsoft Excel (xls, xlsx)
Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt, pptx)
Microsoft Reader File (lit)
Microsoft Word (doc, docx)
Microsoft Works (wps)
Microsoft Visio (vsd)
Nikon Electronic Format RAW Image (nef)
Olympus RAW File (orf)
Portable Document Format (pdf)
Raw Image Data File (raw)
Scalable Vector Graphics (svg)
Sony Digital Camera Image (arw)
Sony eBook Reader File (lrf)
Text Formats (rtf, txt)
TIFFs (tif, tiff)
WebP (webp)

Try it out. Tell us about it on your Talk to Us board.