If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.
Also there is a useful plain-vanilla utility called antiword (which does a nice job of just grabbing the text), useful for creating indexes and the like (I personally use it for Plone, an open source CMS) The other utility around is wvWare, but this has a lot of cascaded dependencies so is difficult to compile (build from scratch, as there is not off-the-shelf version) on some systems. Good luck, and I wish you well extracting your intellectual property from M$ proprietary format !