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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?

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

j4k3 OP ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

free is not as in freedom from stalkerware, and there is only a 1 month blank-check impossibscribe extortion type trial scam.

Grangle1 ,

If you’re already thinking of extracting/attempting to run a desktop version of Office, you may as well save yourself the effort if you can and give the free online version a try. You’ll be using a proprietary piece of software either way.

Blue_Morpho ,

You don’t have to keep the sub. Pay $10, convert the files, unsubscribe.

skullgiver ,
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

I thought we stopped doing the “m$” thing around 2010.

Word barely supports old Word files. Very few tools can reproduce .doc files other than Office itself, and even Office versions aren’t all compatible.

My approach would be to install some kind of Office on a machine and just script the hell out of opening files and saving them as docx or whatever open format Word supports these days. Word exposes a COM interface you can script against, so most programming languages and JScript or VBS can automate this process.

If you can figure out how to scan files in a loop, this snippet may get you started:


<span style="color:#323232;">Set word = CreateObject("Word.Application")
</span><span style="color:#323232;">word.Visible = True
</span><span style="color:#323232;">word.Documents.Open("C:Documents and SettingsUserHello.doc")
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Set doc = word.ActiveDocument
</span><span style="color:#323232;">doc.SaveAs "C:Documents and SettingsGebruikerMijn documentenexport.docx", 16
</span><span style="color:#323232;">word.Quit()
</span>

To do this with reasonable speed, keep one instance of word around and close the documents rather than quitting Word every time you iterate through the list.

theshatterstone54 ,

Just use OnlyOffice or this: flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.o20.word

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.

j4k3 OP ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

I can’t even extract the header. It is coming up as a binary, but it is just mystery encoding shenanigans of m$ criminals failing to build to the iso standard, no doubt, to cause this very issue and attempt to justify infinite payments for a finite tool. The error is in position 22 according to iconv. With $ bat, it reports binary, Only Office won’t even display and fails to pop-up. Both AbiWord and Libre Office detect over a dozen Asian languages and freezes after ~1-2 min, but display. Python3 Docx can’t even load the ‘document = Document(’/tmp/test.docx’)` line.

just_another_person ,

Okay. First off, I downvoted you for obvious reasons.

Second, if you’re not sure how to extract the header of a file, just Google that. You may be ill prepared and asking for help here.

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.

j4k3 OP ,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

It’s recent stuff. He likes a Fedora machine, but the only issue is the inability to replicate his Word docs. At this point I don’t know if Libre tools will be easy enough for him. There us nothing really intelligent happening in these files. He is not capable of handling any kind of real world complexity. So everything is going to be whatever was made super simple and easy in m$ Word.

I went through my old CD collection, but don’t have disks beyond Office for XP.

pcouy ,

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

anothermember ,

It’s worth a try, though in my experience it can struggle with very large files.

GetOffMyLan ,

Why not just use the windows machine?

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.

_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.

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