Like its Microsoft counterpart, OpenOffice has a macro language. You can start up OpenOffice from the Linux or Windows command-line prompt with instructions to to run a particular macro, and you can even pass a filename as a parameter to that macro. Adding the -invisible switch to the command line tells OpenOffice to start up without the graphical user interface (GUI). Put all these together, and you’ve got a command line that converts a Microsoft Office file to an OpenOffice file (or an Acrobat file) with no use of the GUI. To convert a hundred files, you can use a Perl script or other scripting language to create a batch file or shell script that has the hundred commands necessary to convert those files.
Link: XML.com
