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?
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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.
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.
Too many documents and Office 365 is a $10 month sub scam.
I can’t comment on how many documents you have, but there’s a free version of Office 365
You don’t have to keep the sub. Pay $10, convert the files, unsubscribe.
Generally, no. M$ office has some pretty invasive DRM, so your best bet to running it on linux is to run it on a windows virtual machine
In my experience, OnlyOffice has the best compatibility with M$ Office. You should try it if you haven’t
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.
Honestly it might be worthwhile to just get a month of Microsoft 365 and use the web client. You can upload all of the files to OneDrive and open them in the web version of Word to do what you need. Nothing beats native compatibility in a project of this scope.
OnlyOffice.
Not to be confused with OpenOffice.
(LibreOffice forked from OO back then.)
Assuming you meant “.docx files”, those should open without issue in LibreOffice. As others have said, OnlyOffice is another popular option if format preservation is a goal.
What do you mean when you say the files are “not supported” by the tools you’ve tried? What, exactly, is happening and what are you trying to accomplish? The end goal wasn’t clear to me from your post.
Getting Word to run under wine will require much more effort than copying the Word binary.
Yes .docx.
It appears as though the encoding is missing in such a way that nothing in Linux recognizes the file. The underlying CLI tools don’t have a way of converting the file. I tried with Python’s docx tool and with iconv. It has to be encoding related because some tools initially load the file with several sets of Asian characters instead of English. However, there is no hexadecimal or sections of entirely binary looking data. Archiving tools do not open up the the file to reveal anything else like a metafile or header. Neo vim shows garbled nonsense throughout. Bat warns of binary. Python won’t load the file, nor will Only Office. Libre Office and Abi Word load initially with Asian characters before crashing.
The only option is likely gong to be setting up the W10 machine and converting a bunch of files within it.
Ultimately, my old man thinks he can be an author all of the sudden and is trying to write. He’s not very capable of learning. I’m not confident that he can learn to use FOSS to do the same thing he has been doing. This post was just to see if there are options I am not already aware of that might actually work in practice. I can easily do everything I need in FOSS. I can do everything he needs to do. I’m more concerned about becoming his tech support when he forgets how to copy pasta. He already fails to separate the internet hardware connectivity from the web browser and operating system within his mental model of technology.
Sounds like it’s actually a .doc file that has been renamed to a .docx for some reason. Real MS Word would probably still open it fine, but open source tools would fall over hard.
You mentioned you can’t decompress it either. If it was a real .docx you could rename the extension to .zip and unzip it with any archiver to see the contents. If the archiver complains about the format, then it’s not a real docx.
Thanks for clarifying, and I can appreciate your overall concerns as I face the same dilemma with my aging relatives.
Just to confirm, have you opened these files in Word yourself (or witnessed them being opened), to verify they are in fact valid documents? if valid, are they meant to be in English?
It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen “other” files renamed with an incorrect file extension.
I have office 2007 on a winxp VM, I haven’t had to use it in a few years, but it is there as a back up
That’s EOL
Long past, but for old files especially, old .doc files it is great as a backup.
It lives in a VM that never has access to the internet, it almost never gets started up.
I thought we stopped doing the “m$” thing around 2010.
Word barely supports old Word files. Very few tools can reproduce .doc files other than Office itself, and even Office versions aren’t all compatible.
My approach would be to install some kind of Office on a machine and just script the hell out of opening files and saving them as docx or whatever open format Word supports these days. Word exposes a COM interface you can script against, so most programming languages and JScript or VBS can automate this process.
If you can figure out how to scan files in a loop, this snippet may get you started:
Set word = CreateObject("Word.Application") word.Visible = True word.Documents.Open("C:\Documents and Settings\User\Hello.doc") Set doc = word.ActiveDocument doc.SaveAs "C:\Documents and Settings\User\export.docx", 16 word.Quit()To do this with reasonable speed, keep one instance of word around and close the documents rather than quitting Word every time you iterate through the list.
I started using M$ around 2010 personally
I will agree with the people suggesting “VM and a pirated copy”
Just get like office 2010 and windows 7 off of the web, run it in a VM, convert the files, dump it all.
Instead of pirating anything, you can instead use:
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts for activation
https://massgrave.dev/office_msi_links for download of office
Doesn’t Office 2010 work in Wine?
It’s not open source but probably has the best compatibility. You can give it a shot.
https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
Needs an account after one week though.
Looks interesting. Any info on whether Excel Macros work for it?
