[Gllug] Reading M$ files

[John Edwards]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2001 at 08:06:31PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote:
> On 17 Sep 2001 19:58:37 +0100, John Edwards wrote:
>>> We've been handed a Microsoft Works 2000 file, extension .wdb
> 
>> I thought that Word 2000 still used the same .doc extension and 
>> file format as Word 97.
> 
> It does. The file is from Works 2000, not Word 2000.
> 
>> ".wdb" is not listed as a recognised file extension on my NT4 
>> virtual machine with Office 2000.
> 
> You don't have Microsoft Works installed, then.

I realise now that I had managed to totally forget about the horror of 
"Microsoft Works" for two whole years that I could not even recognise 
the name.

>>> Nothing (abiword, StarOffice, ...) seems to want to read it.
>>> Anyone got any ideas?
> 
>> Try "string FILENAME | less" to look at the ASCII dump and search for 
>> some thing like (Word.Document.8), indicating Word v8 (aka Word 97).
> 
> Same suggestion, though the commands is 'strings' rather than 'string'.

Quite right.

But an NVidia X server refusing to accept keyboard input and then having 
to be manually killed can really break your concentration.

> You're not going to be able to get formatting out of it, but the
> plaintext will be buried in there. If you needed it to print/look at
> with formatting, you're going to need to ask for an .rtf or ascii
> version. I'm not aware of any open source Works viewers.
> 
> ~C.

Does Works do HTML ?

If so you could ask them to send you that and pipe it through a HTML 
sanitiser like htmlclean or tidy to make it readable. I could preserve 
information in tables better than the rtf format.

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|    John Edwards, Email: John.Edwards at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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