Microsoft Word Viewer: Open And View Word Documents Without Installing Office

The WordPad and Notepad programs that ship with Windows aren’t good document editing tools. In fact, as you likely know, none of these programs support documents created in Office Word program and support only basic text and rich text formats (WordPad).

Microsoft Word Viewer

If you download Word documents from the web very often and don’t have Microsoft Office Word installed on your PC, there are a couple of third-party applications that can help you open Word documents without any issues. For instance, you can use OpenOffice to open and edit all Office documents. Google Chrome lets you open Word, Excel and PowerPoint files within the browser by just installing an extension.

You can even use Microsoft’s web version of Word to open and edit Word documents provided that you have a Microsoft account. In addition to that, Microsoft offers a free program called Word Viewer to open Word documents on PCs that don’t have a version of Office installed.

The only catch with Word Viewer program is that it doesn’t support documents created in Word 2010 and Word 2013 by default. In short, it’s compatible with only .doc file and doesn’t support .docx format out of the box. You need to download and install Office Compatibility Pack in order to add support for .docx.

NOTE: You need to manually download and install Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint file formats after installing Word Viewer to add .docx support.

Supported formats by Word Viewer

By installing Word Viewer and Office Compatibility Pack, you can open .txt, .docx, .rtf, .docm, .htm, .html, .doc, .wpd, and .xml file formats.

Note that Word Viewer can’t be used to edit Word documents and can be used to open, view, print and copy Word documents. You need to install Office Word or third-party program such as OpenOffice to edit Word documents. Web version of Office Word is an option as well.

If you need a program to open PowerPoint files, please download and install PowerPoint viewer program from Microsoft.

NOTE 2: We know that there are a bunch of good programs available to open, view and edit Word documents and are better than the official Word Viewer. This program is useful for those who don’t need a basic software to read and print Word documents.

Download Word Viewer