hi all,

to my mind it not good idea to learn complex buggy outdated
proprietary format (even two) - i suggest "feature-proof" way :)

you can use Sun`s ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office
http://www.sun.com/software/star/odf_plugin/index.jsp then save files
as ODT (or just use OpenOffice open Word 2003 files & save as ODT -
this can be automated), then perform two simple transformations
instead one complex - (1) extract data to custom XML file (2) make new
document from extracted data in OpenOffice Calc format
(http://openoffice.org) then if you really need MS Office 2003 format
- you can save it from OpenOffice as MS Excell 2003 document (can be
automated too)

for archive handling i usually use 7-zip comand line (http://www.7-zip.org/)

sure i can help if you want

with best wishes,
Slav

p.s. if to be truly - i don`t understand why you trying to extract
data from one not proper format and put into another not proper format
for data handling (even OpenOffice format not proper too) - maybe
better to put extracted data to eXist database and then generate any
format that you need (or anyone else) on the fly?

On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 1:45 PM, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
>  > I have one doubt. I want MS Word  file to convert MS Excel (like
>  > database) files using XSLT. Is it possible ? If yes, How
>  >
>
>  It is possible to export XML from Word, and it is possible to import XML
>  into Excel, and of course it is possible to convert the first XML into the
>  second using XSLT. So yes, it is possible.
>
>  However, these XML formats are quite complex and not particularly
>  XSLT-friendly, so although it is possible, it is not at all easy. Of course
>  the details depend on (a) what particular transformation you want to
>  perform, and (b) how general you want to make it (that is, how large a class
>  of Word documents you want to recognize).
>
>  It's going to be quite a bit easier, I suspect, if you use XSLT 2.0 rather
>  than 1.0, because of the facilities for grouping and regular expression
>  matching.
>
>  Michael Kay
>  http://www.saxonica.com/