Broken laptop - Recovering info from hard drive help

Our daughter has dropped my wifes laptop, completely breaking the mount for the screen. Its a very old model and there was talk of replacing it anyway. The issue is that she has kept her work on the hard drive without backing up. No fault of mine as I had linked it to our network drive, cloud storage and gave her a USB stick.

My question is, could I buy an external caddy/case for the hard drive and connect to either a desktop be it either a Mac or PC to recover the documents she needs?

I know I could look for the services of someone that retrieves data, but thats going to be quite an expense. We are only looking for approx a dozen word/excel sheets anyway.

Help/info appreciated

 

Should be able to to use a cheap usb caddy from amazon or ebay, yes but make sure you get the right one because if the laptop is old it might be an IDE drive rather than SATA.
If you have a desktop computer then you can just use a cable and plug it directly into the motherboard instead

 

The data retrieval services are for broken drives, if the drive is intact then it's just a case of plugging the appropriate cable in (in this case probably slimline IDE/PATA) and plugging the other end into a PC (or you can use a caddy if you want to keep it or connect it to a laptop).

 

Success

I had a small backup drive that I use for photos, so used the caddy with the hard drive and have managed to find the documents.
The wife says thanks too