One of Leopards cool new feature is Quickview and what Quickview lets you do is preview and documents, music, videos, without launching any applications.
So to use this feature in Leopard select the document or media file and press the “spacebar” now you will be able to scroll through any text or media files. When you are finished in Quickview hit the “spacebar” again to close. Quickview is only for viewing files, you will not be able to edit files within Quickview.