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?
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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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.
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You don’t understand how file formats work I guess. You can’t just ‘head’ an encoded file and expect a terminal to output what you want. Do some research.
OnlyOffice.
Not to be confused with OpenOffice.
(LibreOffice forked from OO back then.)
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
Why do you spell it as “m$ office”?
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.
Why not just use the windows machine?
im pretty surs that codeweavers crossover still works for microsoft365. atleast I used it with office365 last year without major issue.
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.
Try your local library.