Open a Word or OpenDocument file without Word

What it shows

• The text, in reading order, with headings (Title and Heading 1 to 6, or any style with an outline level), bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript. Bulleted and numbered lists keep Word's own numbers, such as 1., a) and iv..
• Tables, with merged cells joined the way Word joins them, across columns and down rows. On a phone a wide table scrolls sideways inside its own box, and the rest of the page stays put.
• Embedded pictures, in the text where they sit, each with its alt text and a Save link. A picture is saved exactly as it is stored in the file, often at a higher resolution than the page shows. PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP and BMP pictures are displayed. EMF and WMF drawings (Windows metafiles, common in files from older Office versions) cannot be displayed in a browser, but you can still save them.
• Comments, each with its author, date and text, and the words it is attached to highlighted in the document. Tracked changes are shown inline, with inserted text underlined in green and deleted text struck through in red, and listed with who made each change and when.
• The file's own details: title, author, last modified by, created, modified and last-printed dates, revision number, total editing time, company and template. Word fills in the author and “last modified by” from the name set in Office on the computer that saved the file, so check them before you pass a file on.
• Counts: words (counted here, deleted text left out), paragraphs, tables and pictures, and the page count as last saved by Word (docProps/app.xml) or LibreOffice (meta.xml). Footnotes and endnotes, header and footer text, and every link with the address it really goes to are listed below the document.
• Anything the file would fetch from the internet. An external picture, an INCLUDEPICTURE or INCLUDETEXT field, a linked object or an attached template on a web address is never requested. Each one is listed as remote reference not loaded, with its address and a count.

What it cannot do

• The page layout is not reproduced. Text flows as one column in the page's own font. Columns, exact fonts and sizes, colours, page breaks, margins, and where headers, footers and text boxes sit on the page are not shown. The page count is the one Word or LibreOffice worked out when the file was last saved. A file written by another program may not have one.
• Word 97–2003 .doc and .rtf files are not opened. They are named, not shown blank. A .doc is a binary compound file, a different format from .docx. Open it in Word, LibreOffice Writer or Google Docs and save it as .docx, then drop that here.
• Password-protected documents cannot be opened. A .docx with a password to open it is encrypted, and viewhack names it as password-protected. A password-protected .odt is detected the same way. A document restricted only against editing (“Restrict Editing”, “Mark as Final”) is not encrypted and opens normally.
• Equations are shown as plain text only: the characters stay, the layout goes, so x² + y² comes out as x2+y2. Charts and SmartArt are not drawn. Their place is marked in the text. Shapes, WordArt and embedded objects (an Excel table pasted as an object) are not drawn either. Where the file keeps a preview picture of an object, the preview is shown, or offered for saving when it is a Windows metafile.
• Macros never run. A .docm's VBA project is not even read, and the page says when a file has one.
• Large files are read whole into memory. In a test, a 20,000-paragraph document (580,000 words, 5.9 MB of XML in a 65 KB file) was unpacked and read in about half a second on a desktop computer. Drawing that many paragraphs in a phone browser takes longer. Big pictures cost memory too.

Useful to know about Word and ODT files

A .docx is a ZIP of XML files

The text is in word/document.xml, pictures are in word/media/, comments in word/comments.xml, and the author and dates in docProps/core.xml. Rename a copy to .zip and any unzip tool shows the parts. A .docm is the same plus word/vbaProject.bin, which holds the macros. A .dotx is a template.

An .odt works the same way

LibreOffice Writer's format is a ZIP too. The text is in content.xml, pictures in Pictures/, and the author, dates and statistics in meta.xml. In meta.xml, meta:initial-creator is the person who created the file and dc:creator is the person who saved it last.

Deleted text is still in the file

With Track Changes on, “deleting” a sentence only marks it deleted. The words stay in document.xml in <w:del>, with the editor's name and the time, until someone accepts the change. Comments stay too. Word's File › Info › Inspect Document removes both.

Why a document might fetch something

Word follows an INCLUDEPICTURE field or a linked picture to a web address when it opens or updates the file. That tells the server when the document was opened and from which IP address, which is how “canary” and tracking documents work. An attached template on a web address is a known phishing trick called template injection: Word downloads the template, and the template can carry macros. viewhack lists these addresses and never contacts them.

Dates

Word stores the created and modified times in UTC (2026-09-21T16:30:00Z), and they are shown that way. LibreOffice stores the saver's local time with no time zone. That is shown as written and labelled so.