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Uses for the free Office viewers

Microsoft has a number of free programs that you can use to view (but not change) Microsoft Office documents.

USING THE FREE OFFICE VIEWERS

Microsoft has a number of free programs that you can use to view (but not change) Microsoft Office documents.

In this issue we’ll show you why you’d use them, how to get the free viewers, the alternatives and the inevitable warnings.


WHY GET THE OFFICE VIEWERS?

In years past, most people just reinstalled their copy of Office on any machine that needed to view the documents. But since Microsoft has tightened up the product activation system that’s no longer possible.

However the Office viewer programs have been around for many years and will help you fill the gap.

These free programs will let you view, copy and print Office documents – Word (DOC), Excel (XLS) and Powerpoint (PPT).

While the Office viewers can have security issues (just like the full Office apps) they happen less often and so could be considered somewhat safer in that regard.

You can install the Office viewers on computers and for people who don’t need the power and cost of the full Office suite. We’ve seen it in warehouses to let staff view documents and worksheets posted on a network share. Grandparents have it to view email attachments that come in via Outlook Express.

The Microsoft Office viewers have a smaller footprint in terms of hard disk space and memory used which makes them an option for older or overloaded machines.

The Powerpoint viewer is especially useful because it lets you show your presentation on any Windows computer. This is useful if your laptop won’t work for that important meeting.

HOW TO GET THEM

There’s a long and somewhat confusing list of the viewers at the Microsoft Office site. 

Viewers for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Visio documents are available.

The Access viewer doesn’t let you view MDB files, only ‘snapshots’ generated by a full copy of Access.

On the Microsoft Office site it also looks like you can download earlier versions of the viewers but the links take you to the one download page. For example the link called ‘Excel 2000 Viewer’ goes to the ‘Excel 2003 viewer’, except that only the latter page includes a notice about a separate patch download.


COMPATIBILITY

Some older versions of the viewers are available but we suggest you always get the most recent version of the viewer that is compatible with your operating system PLUS any security patches. The viewer and associated patches should be available at the links given above.

The Microsoft site only has the most recent viewers which means they will run on Windows XP and Windows 2000. Support for Windows ME and Window 98 Second Edition is patchy (Yes for Powerpoint, No for Word and Excel).

There are no Office viewers for the Macintosh (there’s a promising link called “Converters and viewers for Macintosh users“) but there’s no actual viewers. An alternative for Mac OS X users is to install OpenOffice which will import standard Microsoft Office documents.


WHICH DOCUMENTS?

The Powerpoint and Excel viewers will only open their native document formats but the Word 2003 viewer has a wider scope and can display:



  • Word documents (.doc etc)
  • Rich Text Format (.rtf)
  • Text (.txt)
  • Web Page formats (.htm, .html, .mht, .mhtml)
  • WordPerfect 5.x (.wpd)
  • WordPerfect 6.x (.doc, .wpd)
  • Works 6.0 (.wps)
  • Works 7.0 (.wps)
  • XML (.xml)

None of the current viewers can cope with the upcoming Office 2007 document formats (.docx, xlsx etc) but doubtless that will happen.

WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?

OK you can open and view an Office document with one of these viewers – big deal – but cunning people can find ways around the limitations of the viewers.

The Office viewers let you select and copy parts of a worksheet or document, just like any other Windows program. That means you can select some or all of a worksheet and paste it into another spreadsheet program (like OpenOffice for example).

Any of the rival Office suites can open Microsoft Office documents directly however more complex documents don’t always get converted correctly. If you’re having to import programs with a ‘foreign’ Office suite, try opening the document in the Microsoft Office viewer and copying the data across. That might have a better chance of retaining document fidelity.

You can also print the document from the viewer but not just to paper. For example most Adobe Acrobat converters work by having a Windows ‘print’ driver to do the job but instead of going to a printer the document is saved to a PDF file.

The Excel viewer includes the ‘Autofilter’ function to let you sort filter a table down to the ones you want to see (by name, blanks, non-blanks etc). If you want to share a simple database, save it as an Excel worksheet which can be viewed with the Excel viewer or the full program.

SECURITY NOTE

Security issues can arise with the free Microsoft Office viewers and Microsoft covers those problems in their somewhat confusing security bulletins.

Not all security problems apply to both the full program and its related viewer, for example a patch for Word 2003 doesn’t necessarily mean that there needs to be a patch for the Word 2003 Viewer as well.

Patches for viewers are normally listed in the same security bulletin as the one for the full Office programs, just look for the separate mention of the viewers (if any).

For many people the free Microsoft Office viewers are not necessary (after all, you have the full suite) but they are worth keeping in mind for extraordinary or emergency use.

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