My old man has a bunch of .dox stuff saved. He has complicated large files saved that are not supported by any of the FOSS conversion tools. I’ve tried Libre office, Abi Word, and every command line tool and converter I can find. These are entire book sized files.
I have a W10 machine with Word. Is extracting the .exe and running it with wine feasible without making an epic mess or massive project of this?
Generally, no. M$ office has some pretty invasive DRM, so your best bet to running it on linux is to run it on a windows virtual machine
im pretty surs that codeweavers crossover still works for microsoft365. atleast I used it with office365 last year without major issue.
To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.
To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.