How to Batch Convert Text Documents in Ubuntu 14.04

Do you want to batch convert Microsoft Word file to Open Document text file??. Great, If you want to convert “.doc” file into “. odt” file, then this post might be very useful to you. Here in this conversion, we are using a software called as AbiWord. Abiword is an open source word processor, which is used to convert word processing documents in bulk.

Abiword is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and can be operated through the terminal. Just have a glance at this article to know about how to batch convert text documents in Ubuntu 14.04.

Steps to batch convert text documents:

Step 1: First open your terminal and type “sudo apt-get install abiword” in order to install ‘abiword’ and then press enter.

Step 2: Press “Y”(yes) when prompted “Do you want to continue”.

Step 3: Go to your unity dash and then type “abiword” to check whether abiword is installed in your system or not.

Step 4: Now again go to the terminal and traverse to your text document folder. As in my case, it is “cd /Desktop/Documents”.

Step 5: Now type the following code “for file in * ; do abiword –to=odt “$file” ; done “ to convert all your “.doc” file to “.odt” file.

Step 6: Finally, you can see all your Microsoft Word files (.doc) has been converted into (.odt) file as soon as you run the code. (Note: Here your original file is remain intact as you can see in the image below)