Best Method for Converting An Executable to A Word Doc? I'm sorting through a bunch of old writings &amp; am running across a large number of files, which are exe's rather than doc or docx or txt or any other normal text doc format. I am almost positive that all of these writings were done in Microsoft Word for Mac (probably) 2004. There are gibberish characters at the header &amp; footers but the body text has all seemed intact, from what I've glanced at. I am curious about how this might have happened, but my priority right now is just reconverting these files back to a simple text format. There are hundreds of documents, mostly notes, but some finished pieces and I would much prefer to not have to go in &amp; remove the junk text from all of them by hand. So...what are my options? thx
The file you linked can be opened, for proper display, in LibreOffice, which by the way is free.

I was also able to convert this file via the command line to a plain text document using LibreOffice's executable soffice using the following syntax:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to txt $FileNameToConvert


Example:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to txt "'…&amp; hitting number three on 3"


The above command created the "'…&amp; hitting number three on 3.txt" file and I then opened it in TextEdit and it displayed properly as it should.

You can batch convert the documents in the same manner by using a wildcard (an asterisk), e.g..:

/Applications/LibreOffice.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice --headless --convert-to txt *


The above command to batch convert assumes you've installed LibreOffice in /Applications and placed the files to convert in their own directory and have changed to that directory in Terminal.

Note: If you want to convert the files to Microsoft Word documents use doc or docx instead of txt for the --convert-to option, e.g.: --convert-to doc