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How to open a Word file on a Mac without Microsoft Office

. Updated 12 November 2026. 4 minute read. By JOV

Someone sends you a Word document, you double-click it, and your Mac either opens it in an app you didn’t expect or asks which app to use. You don’t need a Microsoft 365 subscription to read or edit a .docx file. There are several other ways, most of them free, and the right one depends on what you need to do with the file.

If you only need to read it

Select the file in Finder and press the Space bar. Quick Look shows a preview of the document without opening any app. It’s fine for checking what a file says, but you can’t edit anything, and complicated layouts may look a little different from the original.

TextEdit, which comes with every Mac, can also open .docx files. It keeps basic formatting such as bold text and simple lists, but tables, pictures, comments and page layout are often lost, so it isn’t a good choice for a file you need to send back.

Pages

Pages is Apple’s word processor. It’s free, and it’s already installed on most Macs (if not, it’s in the App Store). It opens Word documents and turns them into Pages documents. When you’re done, choose File > Export To > Word to save a .docx copy for the person who sent it.

Pages is a good choice if you like working in Apple’s apps. The thing to watch is the round trip: the file is converted when it opens and again when you export it, and some Word features, such as certain fields and complex tables, can change on the way.

Google Docs

Google Docs runs in a web browser. Upload the file to Google Drive, open it, and you can edit it and download it again as a Word document (File > Download > Microsoft Word). It’s free with a Google account and handy when several people need to edit the same file.

It needs an internet connection and a Google account, and it means uploading the document to Google’s servers. For some files, such as contracts, medical letters or anything from work, that may not be what you or your employer want.

Microsoft also offers Word for the web, a free browser version of Word that works with a Microsoft account. The same points apply: it needs the internet, and the file is stored online.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite that you download from libreoffice.org. Its word processor, Writer, opens .docx files and can save them back as .docx. It works offline and handles a wide range of files, including old .doc files from early versions of Word.

It’s a large download, and its menus and toolbars look quite different from Word’s and from other Mac apps, so expect to spend some time finding things.

JOV Office

JOV Office is a Mac app for opening the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files people send you and saving them back in the same format. A .docx file opens as a .docx file and is saved as one, so there is no export step.

For Word documents it has a ribbon laid out like Word’s, with fonts and styles, lists, tables, pictures, columns, and headers and footers. If someone else has added comments or used Track Changes, you can read the comments and accept or reject the changes.

Everything happens on your Mac. JOV Office works without an internet connection, and your documents are never uploaded. It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs. It is free for 7 days, then $2 a month or $15 a year.

It opens .docx files, not the older .doc format. For an old .doc file, LibreOffice or Pages is the better choice.

How to choose

  • To read a file quickly, press Space in Finder.
  • To edit and send it back without changing apps much, use JOV Office or Pages.
  • To edit together with other people online, use Google Docs or Word for the web.
  • For old .doc files, use LibreOffice or Pages.

Make your chosen app open Word files

Once you’ve picked an app, you can tell your Mac to open every Word document with it, so a double-click does the right thing:

  1. In Finder, select any .docx file.
  2. Choose File > Get Info, or press Command-I.
  3. In the Info window, open the “Open with” section.
  4. Choose the app from the menu, for example JOV Office.
  5. Click Change All, then click Continue to confirm.

From now on, every .docx file opens in that app. You can do the same for .xlsx spreadsheets and .pptx presentations, and change it back the same way at any time. The same choices exist for the other formats: see opening an Excel file without Excel and opening a PowerPoint file without PowerPoint.

If you want to try JOV Office, the download and install steps take about a minute.

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