Antiword

Antiword is a program for displaying legacy Microsoft Word documents in common use from MS Word 97 – 2007 as plain text. Typically, antiword is used to display MS Word documents in a terminal window often in combination with standard Linux tools such as head and grep. Additionally, it has the ability to extract images from MS Word documents and save them to disk.

Limitations

 * While quite usable Antiword is far from complete and cannot render complex layouts or obscure formatting to a text terminal without compromise.
 * Antiword predates Microsoft Office XML formats and therefore lacks support for the file format entirely.