re: Converting Word document to ANSI problem
A coupla days should see you up to speed on VB.
One useful feature is that you record macros through keystrokes and record the output as subroutines. So, for instance, you could write a sub to convert a Word doc to .txt, stripping all the control charcters and headers, just by recording the "save as" & ".txt" keys.
Seems like that would do it pretty fast, providing the conditions of use allow you to have VB and MS Word installed locally where you're doing the translation...