I was having a discussion on bookmarks in Word with a friend, and he suggested me to check out his implementation of a query in Word. Since I did not have Microsoft Word installed, I told him I don't have Word so I won't be able to test it.

To this, he mentioned that he'll send the executables and it will work - I argued that without an installation this will fail.

I was rather shocked when he sent me the standalone executables and on running them, Word actually launched and I was able to use almost every functionality o_0

How's this possible? I've never installed Microsoft Office on my system, this isn't any "portable" app or VMWare ThinStall ( thanks nhinkle, didn't know about this).

There are absolutely no Microsoft Office related files - except for winword.exe and excel.exe.

Curiously even Microsoft Excel works fine with just the standalone executable.

winword.exe size is about 38 MB, and excel.exe size is just 35kb, which makes it even more strange.

I'm running on Windows XP, the files were from Office 2003.

I was discussing this on Chat prior to posting, here's the conversation