Linux

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why do you spell it as "m$ office"?

I wouldn't even try with wine these days.

Why don't you use the Win10 machine you have, the online version of Microsoft Office (web browser or app), a VM with Windows, or (if it works for your case) Google Docs or OnlyOffice.

VMWare and archive dot org are your friend

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I've had some success with fmstrat/winapps (if I remember the repo correctly) but that might be overkill for your use case

I bought a cheap win11+office 2021 combo on the net and use a VM. Its not the easiest way but it works...

😔

Just use OnlyOffice or this: https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.o20.word

Try your local library.

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.