Getting text from different file types
 

Over the years I have used a variety of programs and now have files in all sorts of formats that I sometimes want to access. Microsoft Works had a nice feature that enabled you to get the text from a file in any format. Is there any way to do this from a Mandrake distro (or more gernerally, a Linux platform?) Any program or word processor I could download that would work on Linux?

There's no magic. If works did it, it was not on all formats, only those for which it had an input filter. Try OpenOffice.org, as it's probably the one with the more input filters, among the free ones. Else there's StarOffice.

If you don't remember what format the file's in, you can at least get the readable characters inside with the Unix "strings" command.

Yves.

I'll check out some of the possibilities you suggested. You answered my first question. There is no one program that will do what I wanted. Never used the "strings command." Is it supposed to show the text in a file? I can't seem to get it to do that.