I believe that Access was designed to allow applications to write for it, so I don't see why the others wouldn't... I believe I've actually seen some scripts writing to word documents although I'm unsure of how...
The .doc extension is also used by WordPad however, and you can open those .doc files in Word; and you can alternatively open them in NotePad...
Word basically uses Rich Text for formatting as can WordPad (NotePad does not have this ability), but the interesting thing is that the Rich Text is generally trunicated when opening with NotePad.