A fine-working way of extracting data out of MS-word and MS-excel files is the following. It works fine on linux and IRIX. You get the OLE-perl module out of CPAN (Martin Schwartz). Using this module inside perl you can read ms-word and ms-excel files and writing them out again as clean text files, csv or even html files. The OLE Package of M.Schartz is a sort of an upgrade of the LAOLA Package. Read his Documentation which comes with the Package. Including this tools into netscape is quite easy. It is not a plugin, but it works fine as a "helper". The only thing you have to do is editing the "preferences/applications/" specifying the "helpers" which are the perl-scripts or some shell-wrappers of them mentioned above for the file-types .xls and .doc. So you extract in fact the data and write it into a .txt or .html file and use netscapes feature of "netscape -remote openURL(file:/tmp/tmp.html)". To bring it into your netscape session. It is a little bit of hacking but it works fine and is very general.