Microsoft makes viewers available for several of their Office products. The can be obtained by going to
The Microsoft download Center, navigating to the Office product family, and scrolling down to one of the free viewer products. Currently available are:
Word Viewer 2003
Power Point Viewer 2007
Excel Viewer 2003
Visio Viewer 2007
These viewers allow you to read the documents we distrubute in our projects without the need to pay for professional versions of the software. As the name implies, these viewers allow read only, so you won't be able to edit or alter the documents using the free viewers.
As an aside, some people (myself included) may use Word 2007 or Excel 2007. In order to view those from an older (2003) viewer you would also need to download and install the
Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats.
They also offer trial versions of the professional software, including a 60-day trial of Office Professional 2007.
- Greg