Reading/Writing MS Word files in Python

See python-docx, its official documentation is available here.

This has worked very well for me.

If you only what to read, it is simplest to use the linux soffice command to convert it to text, and then load the text into python:

python ms-word read-write

I'd look into IronPython which intrinsically has access to windows/office APIs because it runs on .NET runtime.

CodeHunter