I'm sorting through a bunch of old writings & am running across a large number of files, which are exe's rather than doc or docx or txt or any other normal text doc format. I am almost positive that all of these writings were done in Microsoft Word for Mac (probably) 2004. There are gibberish characters at the header & footers but the body text has all seemed intact, from what I've glanced at. I am curious about how this might have happened, but my priority right now is just reconverting these files back to a simple text format. There are hundreds of documents, mostly notes, but some finished pieces and I would much prefer to not have to go in & remove the junk text from all of them by hand. So…what are my options? thx
Best Method for Converting An Executable to A Word Doc
file conversion
Best Answer
The file you linked can be opened, for proper display, in LibreOffice, which by the way is free.
I was also able to convert this file via the command line to a plain text document using LibreOffice's executable
soffice
using the following syntax:Example:
The above command created the "'…& hitting number three on 3.txt" file and I then opened it in TextEdit and it displayed properly as it should.
You can batch convert the documents in the same manner by using a wildcard (an asterisk), e.g..:
The above command to batch convert assumes you've installed LibreOffice in
/Applications
and placed the files to convert in their own directory and have changed to that directory in Terminal.Note: If you want to convert the files to Microsoft Word documents use
doc
ordocx
instead oftxt
for the--convert-to
option, e.g.:--convert-to doc