How edit a .dat from war2 ??

Hey all, i actually try to edit the units stats, and i've found in the war2dat.mpq the good file to edit i thinK... But problem, it's a .dat file... I've tried to open it with notepad, excel etc... but it not work, it's give undescriptible caracteres...
Do you have any idea, with what i can open this file ? Thank for help ( I wish ) !! ;)

Not really the answer you're looking for, but you can use Wargus - it's an opensource version of the W2 engine which keeps all data in understandable lua scripts.

Err my memory points out to some tool names:

- wardraft


err that is the only one I can think about, there were tools that edited those files, I swear. possibly wardraft is one of them, I do remember editing them.

thanks for your answers all, I've found Wardraft, but it only open *.war files, so i think it's for old version of war2 ??...

or maybe is for war 1!