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Paul A.
Asked: 2019-09-17 10:30:28 +0800 CST

Decoding a file from MS Word 2003

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I have a collection of files that were generated fifteen years ago (not by me) using MS Word 2003 and I want to recover their contents. I've already tried the obvious things, and they both produce garbage characters: Libre Office and MS Word Reader. I did a hex dump of one file and verified from the first eight bytes that it is indeed MS Word 2003. I can also find by scanning the hex dump a few words like "HYPERLINK" and "light". But that's as far as I've been able to get; most of the rest of the dump is just random characters or patterns like "0123456789".

In response to comments:

"file filename" returns "Composite Document File V2 Document, Cannot read section info", and abiword says it cannot read the document. "strings" produces some words such as "Lightworks", "camera", and "Raytrace", but I doubt if they have anything to do with the content of the original file.

Are there any Linux tools that would help me? I assume that since MS Word Reader doesn't help, that attempting the job under Windows would not do any better, and I much prefer working in Linux (Kubuntu 18.04, actually).

Any ideas?

data-recovery microsoft-word

1 Answers

  1. You can use oletools to inspect them like olebrowse path/to/file. Install it with pip install oletools.

    There are more binaries that comes with oletools other than olebrowse. More information is on the link.

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