[MaxCast]

Unfortunatly, I told my dad windows 8 will be just fine.  The biggest fail of 2012, imo.  Now he needs at least a viewer.
Office starter is not available so I am looking for recommendations on a program to at least view an excel and word file.  A secure download site would be appreciated as well.

[TF1216]

Did you try http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10 yet?

How about saving as a .csv and using wordpad?

[mgalusha]

Libre Office is a fairly complete Office suite, free and open source. Runs just fine on Windows 8. It will do far more than view.

http://www.libreoffice.org/

[WireNut]

Check out Gizmo's freeware website. I've used it several times and really liked the software available.

http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-office-suite.htm

[Doublej]

I think these are pretty safe.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=10

[andy_c]

Libre Office is a fairly complete Office suite, free and open source. Runs just fine on Windows 8. It will do far more than view.

http://www.libreoffice.org/

How does this compare with OpenOffice?  I ended up switching to OpenOffice because that dang ribbon interface on the newer MS Office drove me nuts.  I've found the OpenOffice Draw application to be very powerful, but counter-intuitive.  For instance, the arrow key always moves the object by 1mm even if the grid is set to English units.  I was going nuts trying to figure out why my objects were always off-grid until I found out about this absurd behavior of the arrow keys (which can't be overridden) in the OpenOffice Draw forum.  My workaround was to just always set my grid to 1mm, but if there's something better out there for free I'd be even happier.

Edit:  I just downloaded and installed it.  So far, so good.  I had previously tried OpenOffice Impress (PowerPoint Workalike) to read this Earl Geddes .pptx file about multiple subwoofers, but the fonts came out the wrong size, causing the output to be garbled.  Looks perfect with LibreOffice Impress!  I'll post a note about that at Earl's forum.

In checking further about this (which I should have done before posting), I see that LibreOffice is a fork of the OpenOffice source code.  This looks very promising!  Thanks for posting, Mike. 

[MaxCast]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies.  We had a rummage sale this weekend...Ahhhhhhhrgh!!  So glad that is over.
  I installed the MS viewers.  Worked but have to save the attachment then tell it to open with the viewer then open.  I'm sure win8 will let you open all files like this with the viewer with a few clicks, right?  I mean, I don't have to keep seeing the office 2010 ad every time I click an attachment right?  MS wouldn't make it that hard would they? he he he, what a load of crap this win8.
I'll have to play around with it later or go with Libre.
Thanks guys.