File conversion to Word

I probably have a script here that will prompt you for the parent folder containing your DOCX and DOC documents and using the installed LibreOffice v7.1.5 command-line tool, loop through the DOC files and convert them to DOCX, in the same, or designated output folder. I do not see any need to convert DOCX to DOCX again. Probably, these are a priority and should be handled before dealing with the UNIX Executable bearing file icons.

I converted a 1995 and a 2003 DOC file to DOCX using the first paragraph and Spotlight easily found search items in the resulting DOCX files.

In the Finder, locate one of your UNIX Executable Files, press the option key, right-click on it and select the secondary menu item Copy "..." as Pathname. This puts the full UNIX path on the clipboard.

Now, launch the Terminal application and at the command-line prompt, enter mdls followed by a space, and then paste the UNIX path from the clipboard. What is the entry for the kMDItemContentType?

mdls $(pbpaste)

Word DOCX documents have a content type of "org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document" and Word DOC files have the string "com.microsoft.word.doc". If you get anything else or a dyn.... entry, it's anyone's guess what these files were originally.

Another approach in the Terminal for those UNIX Executable files and to determine if they are extension-less DOC or DOCX is the following extraction of the first four bytes of the file:

A Word DOC file:

xxd -l 4 -p $(pbpaste)
d0cf11e0

A Word DOCX file:

xxd -l 4 -p $(pbpaste)
504b0304

Apple removed all the old file recognition they used in favor of the file extension method (and metadata). The Unix Executable File has no extension and no metadata, so that is the closest thing it can identify for file type.

If they were doc files and you made them docx, the text importer for spotlight may not recognize them.

It is also possible that Microsoft did not make a text importer for doc files (I don't have any to check).

If you rename them .doc, they should up in compatibility mode in Word where you can save them as docx. However, that doesn't resolve the main problem of having too many to convert that way.

As another vector to find a converter, Word is scriptable, so you may be able to find a script that would open and re-save all of the files as the "new" OpenDocument format (docx).

What you might try is the following:

1 - change the extension to .txt on a few of the files.

2 - download the free, open-source LibreOffice and and try to open the files.

3 - then do a Save As a .docx file.

There's another free app that may also work: SoftMaker FreeOffice 2018. although it doesn't convert the formatting as well as LibreOffice.

Kind of glossed over the fact that you need to remember that third paragraph from my original post:

In the Finder, locate one of your UNIX Executable Files, press the option key, right-click on it and select the secondary menu item Copy "..." as Pathname. This puts the full UNIX path on the clipboard.

The UNIX pbpaste command would then place the full UNIX path from the clipboard onto the command-line permitting the xxd result.

Be careful adding extensions. Perform a Get Info (option+command+i) on the apparent extensionless file to see if its real extension is simply hidden ([√] Hide extension) by the Finder. If this is unset on that panel, then use the xxd syntax above to see if it is actually a Word document.

You can tell Spotlight to find all Word documents (both doc and docx) with extensions (not UNIX executable) via:

kind:word