It's not going to be that hard to parse an MS Word document

[hotyopa]

It seems like the author of LAOLA has written a module called OLE::Storage, which can parse the Micro$oft OLE document structure (implemented as a directory-in-a-file).

The upside to all this is that these property sets apply not only to Word, but to any OLE compliant program. Given the support that GNOME are building for OLE, might just end up being a v. useful little module indeed.