Zigster,
All I can say about strings is WOW! That works perfectly on Word 2k, WordPerfect 8, and Excel 2k files. Combined with pdftotext you have a nearly complete solution for extracting text from common user docs, which I'm doing for a search engine for a web-based document management site. Just goes to show that if there's something you want to do on Unix/Linux, chances are the tool is already sitting on your hard drive.