Last night I had to view an excel spreadsheet on one of my computers at home that doesn’t have Office installed on it. Instead of downloading OpenOffice and having to worry about any sort of formatting issues that may occur, I figured I could pop on over to the Microsoft site and download the Excel Viewer. Its free and I didn’t need to edit the document so it seemed like a quick solution.

I didn’t see an obvious link on the Excel home page which is understandable (why promote a free viewer when you can sell Office for a few hundred bucks?) but a search in their search box for “excel viewer” yielded the treasure I was looking for.

I clicked the download link and then realized the size of the download. It was 74Megs! 74Megs for a viewer that doesn’t allow you to edit the document at all? Thats crazy talk. I downloaded it anyway because my internet connection was fairly quick but…wow.

74 Megs spread across 1.44mb floppy disks would equate to just over 51 floppy disks. Insanity…