[5] On November 29, 2017, Microsoft announced that Word Viewer would be retired in that month, no longer receive security updates nor be available to download.

The typical macro virus would not spread, but it could still execute (including any malicious code).

Word Viewer 2003 Service Pack 3 was released on 26 September 2007 with Office 2003 SP3.

[4][1] Microsoft continued to provide security updates until February 2019 (mostly because POSReady 2009 shipped with it).

In the meantime, Microsoft has made other ways of reading Office documents available, either through Word Online as well as WordPad (a native component of Windows) in Windows 7 and later, which can create, view or edit Office Open XML documents (.docx) alongside Rich Text Format (.rtf) and text files (.txt).