Microsoft Word Viewer is a discontinued
freeware program for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...
that can display and print
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program 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 platf ...
documents.
Word Viewer allows text from a Word document to be copied into
clipboard 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. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...
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 Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...
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, made available for download via Microsoft ...
users to upload the file to
OneDrive 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 personal user (computing), user account for Microsoft customers to Login, log in to consumer Microsoft services (like Ou ...
.
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. ...
(.rtf)
*
Text files (.txt)
*
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
(.htm, .html) and
MHTML (.mht, .mhtml)
*
Word XML format (.xml)
*
WordPerfect v5.x and v6.x files (.wpd)
*
Microsoft Works
Microsoft Works is a discontinued office suite, productivity software suite developed by Microsoft and sold from 1987 to 2009. Its core functionality includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database management system. Later versions have a ...
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 as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...
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 (a native component of Windows) in
Windows 7
Windows 7 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 July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...
and later, which can create, view or edit Office Open XML documents (.docx) alongside
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. ...
(.rtf) and
text file
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flat file) 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 ope ...
s (.txt).
No versions for any other operating system besides Windows were ever released.
Successors
Microsoft Word Viewer was retired in November, 2017. The Word Viewer features were replaced
Microsoft Word Mobile.
Word Mobile
/ref> For viewing only, OneDrive or Dropbox allows viewing contents through web browser using Word Online.
See also
* Microsoft Excel Viewer
* Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer
* List of word processors
* Comparison of word processors
References
External links
Microsoft pageMicrosoft support page
{{Microsoft Office
Word Viewer
1999 software
Windows-only freeware
Word Viewer
Document viewers