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Do any of you have M$ Word running in present form?

My old man has a bunch of .dox stuff saved. He has complicated large files saved that are not supported by any of the FOSS conversion tools. I’ve tried Libre office, Abi Word, and every command line tool and converter I can find. These are entire book sized files.

I have a W10 machine with Word. Is extracting the .exe and running it with wine feasible without making an epic mess or massive project of this?

eruchitanda ,
@eruchitanda@lemmy.world avatar

OnlyOffice.

eruchitanda ,
@eruchitanda@lemmy.world avatar

Not to be confused with OpenOffice.

(LibreOffice forked from OO back then.)

wizardbeard ,

Assuming the latest version of OpenOffice doesn’t work for these files…

My next course of action would be using the Win 10 machine with Word, or a VM with Win10 or 11 and the latest version of Word. Use MASGrave to trick M$ into considering it licensed if you need to.

Use a Powershell script to interact with Word through the COM object interface and automate opening Word, opening the file, saving it as a different filetype, and closing. Here’s a snippet of Powershell from Reddit for going in the opposite direction (odt to docx) for a single file. I wouldn’t try to do this through Linux, just suck it up and use Windows so you don’t have an extra layer of mess to deal with.

Going off M$ documentation of the save types enum, I would replace “wdFormatDocumentDefault” in that snippet with wdFormatOpenDocumentText or wdFormatStrictOpenXMLDocument, then test it with a single file to see which gives the output you need.

Getting all the files of the starting type from a folder can be done using Get-ChildItem. Store those in a variable and use a foreach loop over the initial file list.

turkalino ,
@turkalino@lemmy.yachts avatar

VMWare and archive dot org are your friend

richardisaguy ,
@richardisaguy@lemmy.world avatar

Why do you spell it as “m$ office”?

XEAL ,

Greedy fucks.

data1701d ,

How old of Docx files are you talking? Something like Office 2010 might run quite well, and your father would have probably had to have used some very weird features for it to be incompatible.

_edge ,

I wouldn’t even try with wine these days.

Why don’t you use the Win10 machine you have, the online version of Microsoft Office (web browser or app), a VM with Windows, or (if it works for your case) Google Docs or OnlyOffice.

pcouy ,

In my experience, OnlyOffice has the best compatibility with M$ Office. You should try it if you haven’t

Tippon ,

Have you tried the online version of MS Office? I’m not sure, but I think there’s a free version. Depending on the file, you might be able to convert it to another format, then use a FOSS tool going forwards.

neidu2 ,

I was thinking along the same lines. Use the online version available via portal.office.com, and use that to convert everything to something more FOSS-friendly.

Not sure if access is free, though.

Telorand ,

This is what I would recommend as well. Try to convert within Word to an older version or open version that’s likely to be compatible with other software. Test one and see if it converts okay.

j4k3 OP ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

Too many documents and Office 365 is a $10 month sub scam.

Tippon ,

I can’t comment on how many documents you have, but there’s a free version of Office 365

just_another_person ,

You can try Pandoc and see if that works, Google Docs, Office365, finding an abandonware version of Word and running on Wine…lots of options to work with.

It might be easier to start narrowing down where you need to look if you get the header info from one of these files.

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