Converting MS Word (and Excel) documents to plain text (Tue, Jan 11, 2005)

Here are two quick links to free programs that I've used to convert Microsoft Word documents (aka, ".doc" files) to plain text:

• catdoc
• antiword (Windows binary)

I just started using catdoc today in combination with glimpse, and I'm pretty happy with it. Note that catdoc also includes an XLS to CSV converter, which is most helpful for my current project.