Microsoft conveniently overlooks that fast and wholly reliable Internet access is still rare for most people. Office Online via OneDrive or the Office Mobile apps are available to everyone on many devices, not just Windows.Īll that’s true, though the online options aren’t necessarily available or practical. It’s the old story, there’s Microsoft’s public reasons and the real reason.Īccording to Microsoft, the Viewers aren’t necessary anymore. If your main machine fails, the Viewer software can be quickly installed on another machine. Smart PowerPoint presenters have the PPT Viewer and presentations on a memory stick. The Word Viewer is also a useful way to view old documents in WordPerfect and Works documents. They worked for all documents from Office 97 onwards, meaning both old and new format documents (doc docx xls xlsx ppt pptx etc).

The PowerPoint Viewer can display a presentation. They’re standalone programs that let you view, print and copy Word documents or Excel worksheets. PowerPoint Viewer goes in April 2018 What are the Office Viewers? Word Viewer is being now retired – November 2017.

The Viewers can still be installed and operate, as long as you’ve got the download.

Nor will the company release any more security updates. That only means they won’t be available for download from Microsoft. The Word Viewer, Excel Viewer and PowerPoint Viewer are being ‘retired’ in Microsoft parlance. The long-standing viewer software for Word, Excel or PowerPoint are going to that Bit Black Hole to which all software must eventually go.

Powerpoint viewer for windows 8