I will teach you how to extract plain text from Word, Excel, and PDF files to power Autonomous AI Agents and grep Automation Pipelines.
What Does “grep Automation Pipelines” Mean? It refers to automated workflows where grep is used to:
Filter or extract relevant data from converted plain-text files.
Chain with other tools like awk, sed, xargs, or custom scripts.
Enable reproducible, scrip-table analysis across many files or formats.

The table you see @02: 08 is located here: https://uproariouslaughter.com/grep
Pandoc, for converting Word .docx to .txt: https://pandoc.org/
gnumeric, for converting Excel .xlsx to .txt: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/gnumeric
poppler, for converting PDF to .txt: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/poppler

Chapters:
00: 00 – Purpose of converting Microsoft Word and Excel files, and PDF files to text files
02: 09 – You can create automated grep workflows once you convert to text files
02: 50 – Using open source technologies to convert files locally
03: 40 – Using Pandoc to convert MS Word files to plain text files
07: 28 – Using gnumeric to convert MS Excel files to plain text files
09: 45 – Using poppler to convert PDF files to plain text files
11: 59 – Important message for audience

AI
Large Language Model preprocessing