Word Viewer
Read .docx in the browser
Formatted text, tables, lists and headings rendered from a Word document — then export clean HTML.
Word Viewer
Runs in your browser · nothing uploaded01 — How to use Word Viewer
02 — Getting good results
03 — Questions
No. The file is unzipped and converted entirely inside your browser tab. This matters more than usual for this tool, since Word documents are frequently contracts, applications and drafts that should not be sent to a third party to be read.
Because it renders structure rather than layout. Word positions content on paper; a browser flows it. Headings, lists, tables, bold and italic all carry across faithfully. Page geometry does not, because there is no equivalent concept to carry it to.
No. Each is a different format needing its own parser. The tool detects them and says which one you have, along with what to do about it, rather than failing with a generic error.
The rendered output is sanitised before it is displayed: scripts, event handlers, javascript: URLs and embedded frames are removed, and only a known set of formatting tags is allowed through. That said, the conversion itself runs in your browser, so ordinary caution about unknown files still applies.
04 — More about Word Viewer
What a .docx actually contains
A .docx file is a ZIP archive. Renaming one to .zip and opening it reveals a directory of XML documents: the text and its structure in word/document.xml, style definitions in styles.xml, relationships in a _rels folder, and any embedded images in a media folder. This is the Office Open XML format, standardised in the late 2000s precisely so that software other than Word could read and write it. That openness is what makes a tool like this possible at all — the archive can be unpacked and the XML interpreted without any proprietary component.
Structure versus layout
Word is a page layout program: its document model is ultimately about arranging content on sheets of a fixed size, with margins, columns, page breaks and headers that repeat. HTML has no page. Content flows into whatever width the reader's window happens to be, and reflows when that changes. Converting between the two means deciding what to keep. The answer this tool takes is to keep everything semantic — what is a heading, what is a list, what is emphasised, which cells belong to which table — and to discard everything that only describes a printed page. The result is a document you can read comfortably at any window size, which is usually the point of opening it in a browser, but it will not match the original page for page.
Treating a document as untrusted input
Word documents arrive by email from people you have never met, which makes them untrusted input in the security sense even when they are entirely benign. The conversion produces HTML, and that HTML is inserted into this page to display it — a path that would be an obvious cross-site scripting vector if the output were trusted blindly. Rather than relying on the converter never emitting anything dangerous, the output is filtered explicitly: only a known list of formatting tags survives, every event-handler attribute is stripped, and URLs using the javascript: scheme are removed. The same filtering is applied again to the exported file, because that file will be opened later in a browser, possibly by somebody else entirely.
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where this came from.
Same shell, same shortcuts, same promise: nothing leaves your browser.