Is this a familiar scene for you?  Someone has sent you a file with the .docx extension and you can’t open it?

Fear not, help is on the way.

Since the early days of Office 2003, Microsoft has been offering a free download of an application called Word Viewer that allows users to open documents created with Microsoft Word on Windows-based computers that don’t have Office installed.

The caveat here is that you have to download to different installers.  The first one installs Word Viewer 2003 and the second installs the Office Compatibility Pack.  This second download is what allows Word Viewer to open documents created with Word 2007.

In this walkthrough, I’ve created a test.docx file and sent it to a bare bones Windows XP installation.  Let’s have a look at how I was able to view it.