Microsoft maintains a list of viewer applications for some of its Microsoft Office applications that Windows users may run to read documents without having Office or a compatible third-party Office solution installed on a Windows machine. The viewer applications were released at a time when Microsoft switched the default format of its Office applications, so that users without the most recent version of Office could view those. Today, there is an abundance of options to read Office documents, many of which are available online and require no installation of software whatsoever. Microsoft retired the Word Viewer application already in November 2017. It notes on the Word Viewer download page that downloads will no longer be available, and that Word Viewer won't receive security updates either anymore (downloads are still available as of November 20, 2017, but this is probably going to change in the coming days). The Microsoft Word Viewer is being retired in Novemb...