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@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.website
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • Nine@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.

    To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.

  • Tabzlock@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    im pretty surs that codeweavers crossover still works for microsoft365. atleast I used it with office365 last year without major issue.