Jan 10, 2011 09:52 GMT  ·  By

A free download from Microsoft is designed to enhance Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 with capabilities allowing users to view Office documents. Viewers for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 - Microsoft Office 97, 2000, 2003, XP and 2007 file format support are available from the Microsoft Download Center.

Customers that were already taking advantage of viewers in order to access Office documents will notice that what the software giant is offering is an update to the past versions of the solutions.

WesttekFileViewers6_CE6R3_Update1.exe is the label of the new executable posted by Microsoft last week.

The Redmond company explained that the refreshed version of the viewers is designed to resolve a memory leak that occurred whenever a .pptx file was opened.

“Viewers are a 3rd party component for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3. This release brings provides document viewing capabilities for Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, as well as PDF file formats, enabling a mobile productivity experience for Windows Embedded CE 6.0,” the software giant explained.

This specific version of the viewers can be leveraged in order to add support for the following Office file formats, Word 2007, Excel 2007, and PowerPoint 2007 to Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3.

But Office file format support was not the only thing which was expanded with this release of the viewers.

In addition, “the following features are also added: source code for containing application allows customization of the UI; and new “Finger friendly UI” allows easy touch use on small screens with pan/flick gestures,” Microsoft explained.

The software giant stressed that customers will need to uninstall older versions of the Office Viewers before they deploy the latest iteration.

The viewers are designed to play nice with Windows Embedded CE 6.0, Windows Embedded CE 6.0 SP1 (required if PB 6.0 Tools have been installed), Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2, and Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3.