Yeah, sometimes MS do right things (like MS-DOS), the new version of Office 2003 is based entirely on XML, wich is the case of StarOffice, and so on OpenOffice and beacuse XML is the universal hands language any wordprocessor is bale to MS office files like shooting a ball with the right foot ! Some coders have already made some perls combines that reads word textes, oh ! certainly PHP will follow , and the next day you'll encounter some hundreds of scripts just to read MS office files :)
You can ping this entry by using http://phpmagazine.net/cgi-bin/pub/mt-tb.cgi/3944 .