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Once every week or two, I will get an email from someone who has included a MS-Word document as an attachment. Since I don't use Windows at my office, it is hard for me to read these documents. I recently downloaded three programs designed to allow linux users to be able to read the contents of a MS-Word file.
Antiword is run strictly from the command line, but it has no shortage of features. I really liked the option to output the Word files to postscript, for example.
Wv used to be called Wordview, but recently changed its name. Wv is not so much a program for reading Word documnets as it is a library to allow other programs to read the Word files. Currently, the popular word processor for Linux, Abiword uses wv as its Word interpreter. What I thought was great about wv was on its home page there was demo of wv running where you could have a Word file stored on your computer displayed in your web browser! So, really, if you don't wan to download a program to read the Word files, you don't have to!
There is one issue I need to address. These programs do not preserve very much of the formatting which is embedded in the Word document. Some try to do more than others, but if there is a graphic file in the document, it will probably not show up when read under Linux. (Try downloading StarOffice, if that is your need.) Also, I found that there were slight differences in how accurately the different packages translated the Word files. The strange thing was that one time antiword would have the more complete conversion, then the next time, catdoc would be better. My solution is to use both tools to compare their output and go with the better tool.
catdoc
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Reading MS-Word files using Linux