You cannot open Microsoft Word in a command line, but you can start Microsoft Word from the command line by following the steps below.

Opening document from the command line

  • Open the Windows command line.
  • Get to the directory containing the Microsoft Word document using the cd command.
  • Once in the directory containing the document, use the start command to start the document in Windows. For example, if the document is called “example.doc,” you would type the following command.

start example.doc

Once the command above is run, if the file “example.doc” existed in the current directory, it would open Microsoft Word and then show the document.

Microsoft Word is a Windows program and cannot display a Word document in the Windows command line window. If you need a document to be viewed in the command line window, we suggest saving the document as a text file.

Opening Microsoft Word from the command line

If you want to open Microsoft Word by itself without opening a document, you’ll first need to determine where the directory containing winword.exe is located by following the steps below.

Using the start command in a batch file is a way of opening a document for the user to read after an install.

  • Open the Windows command line.
  • Type the following command to get into the “Program Files (x86)” directory.

cd “\Program Files (x86)”

  • From the C:\Program Files (x86) directory, type the command below to find the directory containing the winword.exe file.

dir winword.exe /s

  • After the command above is typed, the computer searches for the file and a few seconds later it should list the directory containing “winword.exe.” For example, it may give a directory similar to the example output shown below.

Directory of C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14

  • Once we know the directory, we can get into the directory using the cd command and the name of the directories. For example, to get into the above path from the Program Files (x86) directory, we’d type the following command.

cd Microsoft Office\Office14

  • Finally, once the prompt shows the proper directory, typing winword opens Microsoft Word in Windows from the command line.
  • See the Microsoft Word document for further information and related links.
  • MS-DOS and Windows command line help and support.