Doc2Txt

Doc2Txt is one of those programs that falls into the "if you need it, you need it badly" category.
Converting the occasional document from a Word document to text is no problem to do manually.

Converting lots of documents is a right pain - you'd need to write a macro, make sure it handled everything correctly, then train other people to use it unless you wanted to do the task yourself every time.
Doc2Txt also manages to convert HTML documents. It handles these just as easily as Word documents - simply drag and drop them, then let Doc2Txt do the rest.