Doc2Txt

Doc2Txt is one of those programs that falls into the "if you need it, you need it badly" category.

Converting the occasional document from a Word document to text is no problem to do manually. Converting lots of documents is a right pain - you'd need to write a macro, make sure it handled everything correctly, then train other people to use it unless you wanted to do the task yourself every time.

Doc2Txt also manages to convert HTML documents.