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Well I use Linux so I dont have MS Office but I extract the text from MS Word documents using Antiword or Catdoc and then read them in Vim.

Antiword: http://www.winfield.demon.nl/
Catdoc: http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/software/catdoc/

Add this to your .vimrc to make it automagic:

autocmd BufReadPre *.doc set filetype="msword"
autocmd BufReadPost *.doc silent %!antiword "%"
autocmd Filetype msword call s:MyMSWordSettings()

function! s:MyMSWordSettings()
        set readonly
        set hlsearch!
endfunction

For RTF documents, check out UnRTF: http://www.gnu.org/software/unrtf/unrtf.html

I would have just used xls2csv and some filter utils to get the format I need. I guess that's more of the unix way.

CLI programs are REALLY useful to look at "hidden" content.

'pdftotext' comes with xpdf & is even available natively on windows.

Similarly, for MS Word documents, you may use 'antiword', 'catdoc', and 'wv'.

These programs are quite nice in that they can easily batch-process a lot of documents & then you can go grepping through them for interesting tidbits.

(On the GUI front, evince deserves a plug. It uses the same poppler backend as xpdf and kpdf. I used to use tiny & fast xpdf for most of my pdf viewing, but evince has a few nice features which xpdf lacks & has become my personal favorite pdf viewer.)

Here's a site with the msfonts rpm:
http://ftp.yars.free.net/pub/software/unix/platfor ms/linux/x/fonts/MS_fonts_for_Linux/

What good they did to me?

• They create very big market for powerful 32-bit PC. If anybody still use 8-bit CP/M machines, I doubd that I could afford dual PIV with 1Gb RAM at home to run real OS on it. It seems good. But I suspect that i could be just as happy with some 300Mhz UltraSparc.
  
• They create potential market for software I write. But really I make my living from market where computers was used long before PC era.
  

• They are ultimate cause of spam, adware and other crap which fills my internet channels now. They give millions of uneducated users access f\to internet by selling internet-enabled OS and telling that no education is required to use it.
  
• They pushed their complex and closed document formats as standard de-facto. Yeh, I got some pride from community for writing catdoc, but I'd rather live in the world where I don't need to write such strange thing just to read price-lists downloaded from Internet.
  
• They are hugely responsible for degradation of computer science education. They created so big demand for second-class coders, that no one teaches good programmers nowadays. It is quite hard to us to find new employees. And this is in Russia. I think in US it is much worse.
  
• They also create demand for IE-only internet sites, and encourage uneducated webmasters to do this silly designs, which render blinking pages almost unreadble.
  

You could also use catdoc, which does more than just extracting the strings:

http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/ice/catdoc/ver-0.9.h tml

catdoc.

I guess one place to start would be to figure out what type of computer games women do play. My wife, who is also a quite capable UNIX admin who still enjoys a game of spider , tetris and a few other old-school favorites. I've got a little girl who is bored with flight simulators and such, and prefers puzzle like games where she finds things or builds things.

In other words, from a programmer's perspective perhaps the problem is that games for girls just aren't as sexy or as wham-bam to write as games for guys? Perhaps it isn't as profitable to engage in writing these programs because its hard to dress them up and make them fly?

I mean my wife and I joke about this all the time. Here I want to conquer the world, and there she wants to make it more livable.