An alternative way to view Office documents and many other file formats.
Free Opener is a new, free tool that lets you open and view over 70 different file formats including most of the types used by Microsoft Office.
The concept is for a single download that can let you view many different files without the hassle of separate programs for each file type. While it doesn’t act as an email attachment preview in Outlook’s reading pane, you can double-click on an attachment and it’ll show up in Free Opener.
It covers viewing a range of media types. Documents, text files including programming code, web pages, images, videos and archives.
It will open both old style (.doc .xls .ppt) and new style (.docx .xlsx .pptx) Microsoft Office documents. However it’s a mixed bag for the macro enabled variations. Free Opener can handle Excel .xlsm files but not .docm or .pptm which is a curious omission. Microsoft Publisher files are omitted but Apple Pages (.pages) files are supported.
PDF’s can be viewed with bookmarks (like Word’s Navigation View) but any attachments inside PDF files can’t be accessed.
Free Opener does support a useful range of RAW image formats and Photoshop .psd files. These are high resolution image formats that aren’t widely supported.
Some missing file formats are RAR – a popular alternative to ZIP for compressing files and Microsoft Publisher files.
Free Opener isn’t a replacement for the full file viewers (especially Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF Reader , VLC for audio and video files) but is useful as a backstop to handle file types that you only occasionally encounter. Letting Free Opener preview a file is better than getting a message from Windows saying it doesn’t know what to do.
