You can use program like OpenOffice.org office application to open Ms-Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files under Linux, FreeBSD and other Unixish oses. If you are looking for command line based utilities then try out catdoc or catppt:
catdoc : Reads MS-Word file and puts its content as plain text on standard output. catdoc doesn't attempt to extract formatting information other than tables from MS-Word document, so different output modes means mainly that different characters should be escaped and different ways used to represent characters, missing from output charset
Examples:
$ catdoc filename.doc
$ catdoc filename.doc > /tmp/output.txt
catppt : Reads MS-PowerPoint file and puts its content on standard output
Examples:
catppt filename.ppt
catdoc filename.ppt > /tmp/output.txt
You may need to install catdoc and catppt using apt-get, yum or FreeBSD ports collection:
# apt-get install catdoc catppt
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