Microsoft Document files can be saved in many formats – the very old .doc file format or the new XML based .docx file format. For creating these files you need either the expensive Microsoft Office suite, or open-source alternatives like LibreOffice or OpenOffice. But when it comes to just viewing the Microsoft Word documents, you do not have to install all these large office suites. In the past you could just use a viewer application like the one released by Microsoft itself – Microsoft Word Viewer. But now it is no longer available and Microsoft has removed all the download links.
If you want a lightweight Word viewer application, then you can use another freeware called DocX Viewer – a program developed by Epingsoft. This program is less than 1MB in download size and can open any .docx document created by Microsoft Word 2007 or Word 2010. It is not able to handle newer .docx documents created by Microsoft Word 2016 or Word 2018. This free program is able to open .docx files from Word, even without having to install the Microsoft Office package.
But DocX Viewer is not only able to open and view files, you can use it for printing the Word documents as well. However, saving the documents or exporting them into a different format is not supported. The program is very basic and does not show any toolbars like you would normally see in Microsoft Word. In fact, since the program is designed only for the Word versions 2007 and 2010 respectively, even the newly created Word documents (created using Word 2013 or Word 2016) from the latest version are therefore often displayed in the style of the old version programs as if you are using Microsoft Word 2003.
There is another catch with DocX Viewer – it displays a big sidebar containing advertisements inside the main window of the program itself. It is very annoying and cannot be removed unless you buy a licensed version of the program. This makes no sense as there are so many completely free office suites like LibreOffice available.
You can download Epingsoft DocX Viewer from http://epingsoft.com/download.asp.