You could redirect strings output into another file and give that to your boss and tell him that's the best you can do. The resulting file will be flat ASCII output. (If he wants to read it on a Windoze machine you'll have to convert it with unix2dos as ASCII on Linux doesn't use carriage return at the end of lines but it does on DOS/Windoze.)

e.g. strings mybigfile >mybigfile.txt

If there is specific data he is looking for you can try using grep for it out of the resulting text file.

e.g grep -i billybob mybigfile.txt

Would show all lines that included the "billybob" (ignoring case so it would also find "BillyBOB" for example).

Other thoughts:
If it is table data from a backup it may have been created by one of the other NetBackup type of tools such as RMAN used for NetBackup for Oracle. RMAN is actually an Oracle Product and NetBackup has a policy type that will accept its input.

If you do a Google search you MIGHT be able to find what RMAN headers look like (or other headers such as SQL BackTrack that I used for Sybase backups at a prior job) or whatever. Without knowing exactly what created the tape (including versions of products involved) you're essentially stabbing in the dark.