A process is set forth for previewing a table attachment on a mobile communication device, and upon identifying table content of interest viewing and/or retrieving the entire table from an attachment server. In one embodiment, a small 4x4 row/column preview is presented on the device of every table found in a document attachment, with the cell content textual information limited to the requestingdevice display capabilities. This limitation avoids any requirement to download large amounts of individual cell content to the device. Thus, the user is able to quickly identify which tables are of interest and then request a full table download from the attachment server in an on-demand fashion. In this regard, the preview table itself preferably also functions as a link to the full table stored at the server to facilitate easy retrieval to the device for viewing in a spreadsheet view.