As a follow up to this, I've found out some interesting things about saving a thumbnail preview as part of your MS Office documents. It seems that even though MS makes it available, they would really rather that you didn't do it - at least by default.

I tried to make this a default option by opening the default template, normal.dot, and saving the file / property setting for Save Preview Picture. After doing this, the setting still wasn't applied to new files. After a little digging, I found an article that said MS overrides this setting for the standard template and always turns the setting off. If you absolutely must have the setting on, you have to create a different template file, add a macro to it that is used when creating new files, and then create a new shortcut that calls ...\winword.exe /t"c:\docsNsettings\...\MyTemplate".

You can add an option that prompts for document property settings on save, but this really wasn't the ideal for me.

In conclusion, I think it's best to use a different product to create thumbnails of Office Documents.

Hope this helps someone else looking to do the same thing.

-m@