lessmsi is a portable app with a GUI or command-line to view and extract the contents of an MSI file.

MSI stands for Microsoft Installer, and it works just like an executable does. Double-click any MSI and the install routine will begin. Of course, it's Microsoft so naturally they now call it windows Installer, but anyway...

The neat thing about lessmsi is that while there might be other utilities that do this, we haven't seen any.

To get started you can go to File, Open or drag-and-drop any MSI file into the window itself. By default, all files will in the archive are selected so if all you want to do is extract them, then click on Extract, select a folder and click OK.

There are three other tabs including Table View, Summary, and Streams. There's almost too much information (if that's possible) in each of these to go over. However, we found the Summary tab the most interesting with information on the Title, Subject, Keywords, Comments, Revision Number, Date Created, and much more.

lessmsi hits all the check points we like to see. It's easy to use to extract the contents of an MSI but goes far beyond that for power users.