Free viewers for MS Word, Excel, etc.

Viewers for data formats produced by Microsoft programs are available for Windows systems:

The list above is not intended to be exhaustive; it only mentions viewers for some widely used formats. See the document Microsoft Converters and Viewers by Microsoft for a larger list with links to download pages.

The viewers can be used to view a document on screen and to print it on paper, but not for editing.

A viewer is smaller and faster than the corresponding full program. It is also less risky in the sense that macro viruses probably have no effect. Therefore, even if you have the full program, you may wish to consider setting a viewer as the default handler for the corresponding media types (application/msword, application/vns.ms-excel and application/vns.ms-powerpoint) in your Web browser, if the limitation (no editing) is acceptable.


Date of last update: 2002-01-21.

Jukka Korpela