Microsoft Excel Viewer

~ the obituary ~

The last version of Excel Viewer weighed 73.84 megabytes. That is a number worth sitting with. It is roughly the size of a full Office suite from a few years earlier, and it bought you a program that could not change a single cell. Microsoft shipped it on 14 January 2008 and then never shipped another one.

The product started smaller and earlier. Excel Viewer 97 carries a 1997 copyright and came down as a self-extracting setup called xlviewer.exe, built to open the binary.xls files that Excel 97 wrote. Excel Viewer 2003 replaced it and every version before it. Then Office 2007 arrived with a new XML format, the 2003 viewer could not read it, and Microsoft had to build the thing a third time.

By that third build the format list had grown past what the name implied:.xlsx,.xlsm,.xlsb,.xltx,.xltm, and behind them the older.xls,.xlt,.xlm and.xlw going back to spreadsheets nobody had opened in a decade. One free download, no license key, and a Windows XP box could read anything the accounting department had ever produced.

The retirement notice went up on the Office sustained engineering blog on 16 November 2017. It said the Excel viewer, the PowerPoint viewer, the PowerPoint 2007 viewer and the Office Compatibility Pack would all be retired in April 2018, with no download and no security updates after that. The same post mentioned, in its last line, that the Word viewer was being retired that month. Four products in one paragraph.

~ the case file ~

~ what it refused to do ~

The restrictions were the design. A workbook could be opened and printed, and that was the end of the permission list: no editing a cell, and no way to save or start a file of your own. If the workbook had macros in it the viewer would open it and simply decline to execute them, which made this the safest way in the world to look at a spreadsheet somebody had emailed you from an address you did not recognize.

That last property is the one that kept it installed on hardened machines long after anyone needed it for compatibility. A read-only, macro-inert spreadsheet reader is a useful thing to have on a box that is not supposed to be running other people's code. Microsoft never marketed it that way. It was sold as a courtesy to people who had not bought Excel.

~ the retirement notice ~

Retirement meant the download link disappeared. Copies already installed kept working, because nothing phoned home and nothing expired, so the viewer carried on opening spreadsheets on machines that never heard the news. Some of them are still doing it.

What actually replaced it was OneDrive and a browser, plus the free Excel apps on phones. Microsoft's own list of alternatives in that 2017 post runs to five bullets and every one of them requires an internet connection, which is the trade the whole industry made without announcing it. The gap Excel Viewer filled was a machine with a file and no way to read it. That machine is now assumed to be online.

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