"View Source"-equivalent for Word documents?
If formatting is what you primarily interested in then Word does have a good feture for inspecting all types of formatting applied to text and objects called Reveal Formatting. In Word 2007 and 2010 the shortcut for this panel is Shift + F1.
Otherwise if you are looking for an even deeper understanding of the document format then you can look at the XML for DOCX files.
- Find your DOCX document on disk.
- Change the extension of the document from .docx to .zip.
- Double click on the file and open it in the default archive manager.
- Navigate to the "Word" folder in the zip program and open Document.xml. This is the code behind what makes up the bulk of the document content, although the other files also are used in other ways i.e for styles or font information.
You will definitely need a decent XML editor just to view the data and even then it's quite complex and for a large document will be very very long.
When it comes to DOC there is no easy way to "view the source" as it's a binary file made up of separate streams and therefore there is no easy way to view the contents.
I guess the .doc format is pretty hard, so I can't help you here. However, .docx is actually a zip file with all the details stored in XML files. Thus, rename the file to .zip and take a look at the source!