Microsoft Word Viewer is a discontinued

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

program for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

that can display and print

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms includin ...

documents. Word Viewer allows text from a Word document to be copied into

clipboard A clipboard is a thin, rigid board with a clip at the top for holding paper in place. A clipboard is typically used to support paper with one hand while writing on it with the other, especially when other writing surfaces are not available. Th ...

and pasted into a word processor. The last version was Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 released in 2007. According to the license terms of the Microsoft Word Viewer, the software may be installed and used only to view and screen print documents created with Microsoft Office software. The software may not be used for any other purpose. Users may distribute the software only with a file created with Microsoft Office software to enable recipient to view and print the file. On November 29, 2017, Microsoft announced that Word Viewer would be retired in that month, no longer receive security updates nor be available to download. Microsoft recommended for

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

users to use the Word Mobile application and for

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...

and

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...

users to upload the file to

OneDrive Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) is a file hosting service operated by Microsoft. First launched in August 2007, it enables registered users to share and synchronize their files. OneDrive also works as the storage backend of the web ver ...

and use Word Online to view and print documents free of charge with a

Microsoft account A Microsoft account or MSA (previously known as Microsoft Passport, .NET Passport, and Windows Live ID) is a single sign-on Microsoft user account for Microsoft customers to log in to Microsoft services (like Outlook.com), devices running on on ...

Format support

Microsoft Word Viewer supports: * binary Word documents (.doc) *

Rich Text Format ) As an example, the following RTF code would be rendered as follows: This is some bold text. Character encoding A standard RTF file can only consist of 7-bit ASCII characters, but can use escape sequences to encode other characters. Th ...

(.rtf) *

Text files A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of line (text file), lines of electronic text. A text file exists Data storage, stored as data within a com ...

(.txt) *

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

(.htm, .html) and

MHTML MHTML, an initialism of "MIME encapsulation of aggregate HTML documents", is a Web archive file format used to combine, in a single computer file, the HTML code and its companion resources (such as images) that are represented by external hyperl ...

(.mht, .mhtml) * Word XML format (.xml) * WordPerfect v5.x and v6.x files (.wpd) *

Microsoft Works Microsoft Works was a productivity software suite developed by Microsoft and sold from 1987 to 2009. Its core functionality included a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database management system. Later versions had a calendar application and ...

documents (.wps) The ''Compatibility Pack for the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint File Formats'' was released on 6 November 2006, providing support to document formats found in Word 2007: * Office Open XML documents (.docx, .docm)

History

Word Viewer 6.0 was 16-bit and corresponded to Word 6.0. Word Viewer 7.0 and 7.1 was 32-bit and corresponded to Word 95. Word Viewer 7.1 would execute WordBasic macros without warning. The typical macro virus would not spread, but it could still execute (including any malicious code). Word Viewer 97 was released with Word 97. It was available for Windows in 32-bit versions. It can display Word documents in

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

3.x and later. Word Viewer 2003 was released on 15 December 2004. This includes many security enhancements over Word Viewer 97, and was the first version of Word Viewer to receive security updates. Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 was released on 26 September 2007 with Office 2003 SP3. Microsoft continued to provide security updates until February 2019 (mostly because POSReady 2009 shipped with it). Development of the product has stopped ever since. In the meantime, Microsoft has made other ways of reading Office documents available, either through Word Online as well as

WordPad WordPad is the basic word processor that has been included with almost all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 95 onwards. It is more advanced than Windows Notepad, and simpler than Microsoft Word and Microsoft Works (last updated in 2007) ...

(a native component of Windows) in

and later, which can create, view or edit Office Open XML documents (.docx) alongside

(.rtf) and

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating ...

s (.txt). No versions for any other operating system besides Windows were ever released.

References

{{Microsoft Office Word Viewer 1999 software Windows-only freeware

Format support

History

See also

References