How to Open an XLSX File Without Excel: 4 Free Ways Now That Excel Viewer Is Gone (Tested with ONLYOFFICE)

Excel Viewer: why the old answer no longer works

Microsoft's support article Supported versions of the Office viewers lists every Excel Viewer version as discontinued, with no hotfix, service pack or security update support. A Microsoft Learn troubleshooting article adds the date — Excel Viewer was retired in April 2018 and is no longer available for download — and suggests either installing Excel or keeping files in OneDrive so Excel for the web can open them in a browser.

So an "Excel Viewer download" found today is an old installer that no longer gets security fixes. One of the four options below is a better use of your time.

Way 1 and 2: in the browser — Excel for the web or Google Sheets

• Excel for the web is free with a Microsoft account. Upload the file to OneDrive (a free account includes 5 GB) and open it there — nothing to install.
• Google Sheets: Google's Work with Office files article says that double-clicking an Office file in Google Drive opens it in Sheets. Editing it in Office Compatibility Mode, without converting, needs the Chrome browser and Google's Office editing extension on a computer.

Both routes put a copy of the file on Microsoft's or Google's servers. For a quick look at a harmless file that is fine; for payroll, customer lists or anything your company would rather keep in-house, use an installed program instead.

Way 3: on a phone or small tablet — the Excel mobile app

Microsoft's Excel Mobile store listing says that on devices with a screen of 10.1 inches or smaller you can view, create and edit spreadsheets for free; on larger devices viewing is free and creating or editing needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription. For an attachment you just need to read, the phone app is the fastest route.

Way 4: install a free suite — ONLYOFFICE, tested

ONLYOFFICE's Desktop Editors FAQ says the app is "free for personal and professional use" and opens XLSX, ODS and CSV, among others. To see how faithfully it shows a real Excel file, I made a test workbook in Excel for Microsoft 365 (version 16.0, build 20527) and opened it in ONLYOFFICE 9.4 on the same Windows 11 PC.

• Amount column =C4*D4, an IF status column that labels orders of 100,000 or more, and a SUM total of 739,000
• XLOOKUP (added in Excel 2021) and VLOOKUP returning 189,000 for "monitor"
• FILTER spilling the big-order items down four cells, and TEXT formatting a date
• Data bars on the amounts, a red fill for quantities over 4, a merged title cell and a clustered column chart

Every value matched Excel: the 739,000 total, both lookups at 189,000, the four spilled FILTER results, the formatted date, the big-order labels, the data bars, the red highlight, the merged title and the chart. The only visible difference was cosmetic — Excel drew the data bars with a gradient, ONLYOFFICE with a solid fill.

Is it calculating, or just showing what Excel saved?

An .xlsx file stores each formula's last result next to the formula, so a viewer can display numbers without understanding the functions. To rule that out, I made a copy of the file with those cached results deleted from the sheet XML (15 formula cells) and opened that in ONLYOFFICE. It recalculated the total, XLOOKUP and the TEXT date to the same values, so it is genuinely computing these functions — useful if you need to change a number without Excel.

Which one to use

FAQ