icWord Reads and Prints Word Documents -- Panergy Ltd. has released icWord, a utility for viewing and printing Microsoft Word documents. Targeted at people who need to access, but not edit, Word files, the $20 program is far cheaper than the $400 Word 98 or the $500 Office 98 bundle of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. icWord can open and retain the formatting for files created in various versions of Word for both Macintosh and Windows (though Word 4 or Word 5 for Macintosh); it can also specify substitute fonts to be used when the original typefaces aren't available. icWord has the added capability to extract and view Word documents encoded in StuffIt, Zip, uuencode, and BinHex files. In our initial testing, icWord displayed most Word documents correctly; if all you need to do is look at or copy text from the occasional Word file, icWord is the utility for you. icWord requires System 7.1 or later with 8 MB of free memory; a 1.3 MB 30-day demo version is available. [JLC]

<http://www.icword.com/>
<http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/office/>