text extractor for MS-Office files

 The catdoc program reads one or more Microsoft Word files and outputs
 their contents to standard output as text.
 .
 It is accompanied by xls2csv, a program which converts Excel spreadsheets
 into comma-separated-values format, and catppt, a utility to extract textual
 information from PowerPoint files.
 .
 It doesn't try to preserve Word formatting; its goal is to extract plain
 text and allow you to read it (and, probably, reformat it with TeX).
 .
 This package suggests Tk because it also includes wordview, an
 optional Tk-based GUI for catdoc. The MIME config provided in this
 package will use wordview if X is running, or catdoc directly if it
 is not.