Word Reader 5.0 lets you read DOC, DOCX files without MS Office

While there are dozens of excellent word processors available for Windows, Microsoft Word is the de facto standard. Whether you have Microsoft Office and/or Word or not, odds are you have to deal with Word documents every now and again when someone sends you a file attachment. If you don't have Word, there are a number of ways to deal with those documents. Word Reader 5.0 isn't necessarily the best, but it's one of the simplest.

Basically, Word Reader will let you open and read DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT, or HTML files. You can't create or edit files. Just open and read them. It handles formatting pretty well, although it seems to have issues importing some images.

Microsoft also offers a free Word 2007 viewer for Windows, but the Microsoft viewer weighs in at 25MB, while Word Reader 5.0 is just a 5MB download. So if you've got limited bandwidth, this could be the way to go.

Alternately, you could install OpenOffice.org or Abiword, or use an online office suite like Google Docs or Zoho Writer to open Word files. Or you could use online file conversion service Zamzar to convert the docs to a format you can read.

[via Technix Update]

Tags: docx, microosft-word, word-reader, word-reader-5.0