Microsoft Word Viewer

Microsoft Word Viewer is a discontinued freeware program for Microsoft Windows that can display and print Microsoft Word documents.[2] Word Viewer allows text from a Word document to be copied into clipboard and pasted into a word processor.[3] The last version was Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 released in 2007.[4]

Microsoft Word Viewer
Word Viewer 2003 running on Windows 8
Developer(s)Microsoft
Initial releaseMarch 17, 1999 (1999-03-17) (Word Viewer 97-2000)
Final release
v11.8169.8172 SP3 (Word Viewer 2003) / September 27, 2007 (2007-09-27)
Operating systemWindows 2000 SP4, Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2, Windows 7
Platformx86
Size24.5 MB
Available in36 languages[1]
List of languages
English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (Hong Kong SAR), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
TypeDocument viewer
LicenseFreeware

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.[5]

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.[6] Microsoft recommended for Windows 10 to use the Word Mobile application and for Windows 7 and Windows 8 to upload the file to OneDrive and use Word Online to view and print documents free of charge with a Microsoft account.[6][7]

Format support

Microsoft Word Viewer supports:

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:

History

Word Viewer 97-2000 was released on 17 March 1999.[9] It opens documents that are created with Word 97, Word 2000 and Word for Mac v4.x and later.[10] It was available for Windows in 16-bit and 32-bit versions. It can display Word documents in Internet Explorer 3.x and later.[3]

Word Viewer 2003 was released on 15 December 2004.[9] It added support for Word 2002 and Word 2003.

Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 was released on 26 September 2007.[4][1] Microsoft continued to provide security updates until February 2019.[11]

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 and later, which can create, view or edit Office Open XML documents (.docx) alongside Rich Text Format (.rtf) and text files (.txt).[12][13]

No versions for any other operating system besides Windows were ever released.

See also

References
  1. "Word Viewer". Download Center. Microsoft. 26 September 2007. Retrieved 31 March 2013.
  2. "How to obtain the latest Word Viewer". Support. Microsoft. 27 November 2012. Archived from the original on 12 January 2013.
  3. "Description of the Microsoft Word Viewer 97-2000". Support. Microsoft. 19 January 2007. Retrieved 31 March 2013.
  4. "Description of Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3". Microsoft. 27 September 2007. Archived from the original on 13 December 2007.
  5. "LICENSE TERMS FOR MICROSOFT SOFTWARE - MICROSOFT OFFICE WORD VIEWER 2003". Microsoft. Archived from the original on 2009-03-12. Retrieved 2016-12-23.
  6. "Word Viewer to be retired in November, 2017". Microsoft Docs. 29 November 2016. Retrieved 2017-01-20.
  7. "Office for the web service description". Microsoft Docs. 26 September 2020. Retrieved 3 January 2021.
  8. "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats". Microsoft. 6 November 2006. Archived from the original on 2 February 2007.
  9. "How to obtain the latest Microsoft Word Viewer". Microsoft. 20 November 2008. Archived from the original on 27 June 2009.
  10. "Microsoft Word Viewer". Helper applications. The Institution of Engineering and Technology. 20 October 2011. Archived from the original on 7 September 2015. Retrieved 31 March 2013.
  11. "Description of the security update for Word Viewer: February 12, 2019". Microsoft. Retrieved 30 December 2020.
  12. "Windows 7: The Top 10 Hidden Features". PC Magazine. Ziff Davis. 30 September 2010. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
  13. "Using WordPad". Windows portal. Microsoft. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
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