When you're busy at work and need a document ASAP, the last thing you want is a buggy, slow preview pane when you receive a file. Unfortunately, if you use Microsoft Teams to share and receive Office files, you've likely experienced this first-hand with previews that take too long to load, hog resources, or sometimes even fail to load at all. Well, here's some good news: not only does Microsoft know the problem exists, but it'll publish an update soon that should fix things.

Microsoft Teams' annoying preview issue will soon be fixed

No more laggy peeks into Word files

In a post on the Microsoft 365 Message Center, Microsoft explains what it's planning to do with Teams' iffy preview tool. While the company is trying its best to make previews work better for all of its files, it turns out that not every operating system will get the fixes. As per the message:

Introduction

We’re introducing a standardized preview experience for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in Microsoft Teams across desktop and mobile platforms. This update improves performance, reliability, and consistency when previewing files, resulting in faster load times and fewer preview failures. Availability varies by platform; PowerPoint and Excel are supported on iOS and Android, while Word preview is currently available on iOS only.

The best part is that this new feature doesn't need to be enabled by you or an IT admin. Once the update rolls out, you should get the improved preview window right away. Microsoft hopes to get the update out to everyone's computers by late June 2026, so keep an eye out for it to arrive on your devices in the coming weeks.