How to unbind a Microsoft .OBD file?

Question

I can't seem to find any way to open an old .OBD file. Our company has around a hundred of these binders that were created a long time ago by another company that we took over. They were created using Office 97 on some old machines that don't exist any more.

Our current machines run Windows 7 or later, with Microsoft Office 2010 and later. Is there a way to open these .OBD files? I've tried the Unbind.exe program that some people mentioned on other forums, but it won't run in Windows 7 with any compatibility settings. 7-zip was able to sort of look into the binders, but the files that were extracted aren't readable by any Office software.

We looked into using pywin32 to talk through COM and use Office to do the unbinding automatically, but we still need some program to actually do the unbinding.

Does anyone have any solutions? Thanks.

EDIT: I figured out the problem. The unbind.exe application (available from Microsoft) works, but only when run in a 32-bit OS. Using compatibility mode from a 64-bit OS doesn't seem to work. I was able to use a virtual machine on our servers that was set up for something else. If you don't have a 32-bit environment handy, I'm not sure on how to get around this.

Answer 1

I had 4 Microsoft binder (*.obd) files I wanted to open and didn't have access to a 32bit Windows computer. Please note that this method does not retain the original file names of the documents. Using Windows 10 64 bit I used 7Zip to extract the obd files to folders. Inside the folders were subfolders numbered 1, 2, 3 etc. In the subfolders were data files called WordDocument, Book and PowerPoint Document. I renamed WordDocument files to filename subfolder.doc, renamed Book files to filename subfolder.xls and renamed PowerPoint Document files to filename subfolder.ppt. Then I opened .doc files in Word 2019 and resaved as .docx files. Then I opened .xls files in LibreOffice Calc v7.2 and resaved as .xlsx files. I didn't have any luck with .ppt files. In my case I had to change Word 2019 protected view settings (File, Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings..., File Block Settings, untick Word 2, 6.0 & 95). Hope someone finds this info useful.