Even if you have Microsoft Office and/or Microsoft Word installed on your computer, Word Viewer can still be useful to you. You may want to consider using Word Viewer instead of Microsoft Word when opening e-mail attachments. Word Viewer is safer and more secure than Word because it cannot run scripts or save files.

Most Word viruses use the built in Word scripting. As an example, the classic Word virus makes an unfriendly change to the Word Normal.dot template. Word Viewer ignores Word scripting and furthermore is not capable of saving, modifying, or deleting files. As such, there is little chance of an evil Word document causing trouble when viewed with Word Viewer.

As a bonus, Word Viewer is smaller and simpler program; so it is able to start up and show a document much faster than Microsoft Word can.

Tags: doc, virus, word viewer, normal.dot, word scripting