Conversion Tools: MicroSoft-Office (Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, ...)

SCAI MAS

The SCAI Migration Analysis Suite - MAS helps to plan mass conversions of Microsoft Office documents and templates into StarOffice/OpenOffice formats.
license: commercial, free trial
platform: Microsoft-Windows

ExtenXLS Toolkit

ExtenXLS the easy-to-use, all-java programming toolkit which allows reading, modification, and writing of native XLS files.

Majix

Majix converts RTF files to XML. Freeware, Java

ppt2html

If you convert PowerPoint presentations for the web and want more control over the appearance, cross-browser compatibility and accessibility of your web pages, you may use ppt2html.

libole2

libole2 provides an API to access OLE2 streams as used by Microsoft in their compound files. Such common file formats as Excel, Word, Powerpoint, and Visio use this system.
license: LGPL

POI/POI Serialization Project

The POI project seeks to provide a pure java way to read/write OLE 2 Compound Document Formats (POIFS), provide a library for reading/writing Excel (XLS) format documents (HSSF) and a Cocoon 2 serializer to serialize gnumeric XML files as XLS files.

xlhtml

xlHtml is an Excel 95 and later file converter. It's HTML output can be used as a Netscape Plugin to let you view xls e-mail attachments. It can also extract regions of a spreadsheet and convert the spreadsheet to pure text rather than HTML.
platform: Linux
license: GPL

MDB Tools

MDB Tools is a library and set of utilities for reading Microsoft Access Database (MDB) files. The authors are currently seeking developers to help on the project. Future releases will include a Gtk-based file browser and a small SQL engine.
platform: Linux
license: LGPL

ivt2html

ivt2html is a utility to convert those proprietary format MS Dev Studio Infoviewer (.ivt) help files into ordinary HTML.
platform: Linux
license: GPL

LAOLA File System

LAOLA File System: White Paper by Martin Schwartz about "The binary structure of Ole / Compound Documents" (MS-OFFICE -> N.N.) 1)

"This text does *not* explain how a Microsoft Word file is structured. This text does explain how the file system works that younger Windows programs like Microsoft Word use to store their documents. So actually it should be called OLE file system, as the philosophy behind this file system is Microsoft's OLE / Com technology. But in lack of any binary level technical specification about this topic my explanation might differ in some cases or even be wrong. In this cases I certainly would not explain the OLE filesystem, but something similar. So I decided to take a similar name, either. The name is LAOLA."

OLE STORAGE

OLE STORAGE: (MS-OFFICE -> N.N.) 1)

Newsgroup

microsoft.public.word.conversion

The study of forest typology is becoming more and more practiced in Italy, and it is well known that it may give many important information and can improve the quality of our forest Assessment. One of the most used PC programs to process floristic analysis in Italy and abroad, is surely Anaphyto written by JP.Briane of the Laboratoire de Systematique et Ecologie Végétale of the University of Paris.

It is possible to obtain Cluster Analysis (CAH), AFC, Boules optimisées. The software is very simple to use and has an almost unlimited capacity to process input data.

Nevertheless we can face some problems using Anaphyto. One of the most important is the input data format, because it's very difficult to write it correctly and it's harder to comprehend it "a posteriori". One another is that the botanic classification used for the species names that identify the codes is quite old and doesn't match with the most used classifications in Italy. (EXCEL -> Anaphyto)

Optionaly, catdoc is able to translate some non-ASCII chars into correspoindig TeX escape sequences and convert charsets from Windows ANSI codepage to local codepage of target machine. (Becouse catdoc is russian program, by default it converts cp1251 to koi8-r, when running under UNIX and to cp866 when running under DOS.

Catdoc has rudimentary table handling. In TeX mode it inserts & when encounters field delimiter and \ when encounters end of table row. No table headers are produced although.

Catdoc doesn't even try to preserver MS-Word character formatting. It's goal is to extract plain text and allow you to read it and, probably, reformat with TeX, according to TeXnical rules, most Word users haven't even heard about.", platform: Linux

MSWordView

MSWordView: A program that converts microsofts word 8 binary file format (office97) into html.
platform: Linux

Word2x

Word2x: A GPLed program for converting word documents to multiple formats without any Microsoft software. platform: Linux note: see src2class below, too.

src2class

From C.O.L.A.: "The first official release of src2class is available by HTTP from word2x (via the download page). This was created for writing the toilet roll to unpack types in M$ file formats expediciously. It could also be useful for reading other byte packed file formats.

The code generated is really inefficient as most compilers are not smart enough to figure out what is going on but has no endian, alignment restriction, etc issues.

Note that word2x lives at here and all references to word2x.astra.co.uk elsewhere are out of date and has been for a long time. If your web page has one *fix it now*, it has been broken for far too long already. checkps has moved to this place due the same ISP renaming.
platform: Linux

antiword

antiword converts the binary files from Word 6,7 and 97 into ASCII and PostScript. With as much as possible of the formatting intact.

COREL

COREL word processor for linux, has a very good converter for word6/7/8 built in.

Microsoft

Microsoft Freeware viewer.

Outlook2Ical

outlook2ical is a simple Perl script that converts mail messages produced by MS Outlook Calendar to .calendar file used by the ical program. It handles appointment messages and task requests (with the -task flag).
platform: Linux
license: GPL

Word 2.0 < - > WinWord 6

There is a Word 2.0 AddOn available to read WinWord 6 files, but not Word 97 files. This file is probably to find in the directory ..\winword\textconvert of WinWord 6 and named word6.cnv . Put this file into the according directcory of Word 2.0 and change the according settings.

libwmf

libwmf is a library to convert microsoft's wmf file format to something useful. Currently bindings exist to convert them to onscreen X graphics and to the gif format. Future plans include conversion to the fig format and other vector based formats. Platfom: Linux, license: GPL

webit98

Convert Excel Charts to jpg images for the Web SimtelNet platform: MS-Windows95/98

wb2vb

Converts WordBasic dialogs to VisBasic forms SimtelNet platform: MS-Windows95/98

TextSpresso

TextSpresso: Offers app. 90 different text conversions: Mac to PC, Net to Text, PC to Mac, Text to HTML and others.
platform: MacOS
license: Shareware

hjt2yank

hjt2yank is a bash/awk script which converts treepad (Windows) *.hjt data files to yank (yet another notes keeper) data files.
platform: Linux, MS-Windows
license: BSD