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