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?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    321·
    2 months ago

    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:

    Set word = CreateObject("Word.Application")
word.Visible = True
word.Documents.Open("C:\Documents and Settings\User\Hello.doc")
Set doc = word.ActiveDocument
doc.SaveAs "C:\Documents and Settings\User\export.docx", 16
word.Quit()

    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.