Convert DOCX to Plain Text

1. 1

   Add your document

   Drag a file onto the drop area or click Browse. DOCX, DOCM, DOTX, DOTM, DOC, RTF, ODT and OTT are all accepted. The file is read on your device and never uploaded.

2. 2

   Choose what to include

   Text appears straight away. Use the panel beside it to include or leave out headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, comments and text boxes, to decide how tables and lists are written out, and to set line endings and encoding. The preview updates as you change each one.

3. 3

   Copy or download

   Copy the text to your clipboard, or download it as a TXT file. With several documents open, download one ZIP of separate files or a single combined TXT.

Four document formats, six content zones, real table and list structure, and a choice of encoding, all on your device.

• Four input formats: DOCX and its DOCM, DOTX and DOTM variants, legacy DOC, RTF, and OpenDocument ODT and OTT.
• Every content zone: headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes, comments and text boxes, each one a switch you control.
• Tables that stay tables: rows stay on one line with tab-separated cells, so a table can be pasted straight into a spreadsheet.
• Lists that keep their numbers: bullets and numbering are reconstructed, including nested levels such as 1., 1.a), 1.b), 2.
• Live preview: the text appears immediately and every option rewrites it as you change it, so what you see is always what you will download.
• Copy or download: copy to the clipboard, save a .txt file, or take a whole batch as one ZIP or one combined file.
• Encoding you choose: UTF-8, UTF-8 with BOM for Windows Notepad and Excel, or UTF-16, with LF or CRLF line endings.
• Runs on your device, not our servers: no upload, no queue, no copy kept, and it keeps working offline once the page has loaded.

Each of these is a genuinely different file format, not a different extension on the same one, and each needs its own reader. Anything not on this list is refused at the moment you pick it, with a link to the tool that handles it, rather than after a wait.

• DOCX, DOCM, DOTX, DOTM: modern Word. A compressed archive of XML parts. The macro-enabled and template variants are the same container, so all four behave identically.
• DOC: Word 97-2003. A compound binary file whose text is stored in pieces and reassembled through an index, with list numbering and table shapes held in separate tables again.
• RTF: Rich Text Format. A single stream of nested groups, most of which are font tables, colour tables and embedded pictures rather than text.
• ODT, OTT: OpenDocument text, written by LibreOffice and by Google Docs' 'Download as OpenDocument'. An archive like DOCX, with different element names and its headers kept on the page style.

What Gets Refused, and Where To Go Instead

• PDF: a page-layout format with no paragraphs to read; the PDF to text extractor handles it.
• Excel and PowerPoint: different Office formats entirely; the Excel to CSV converter and the PowerPoint text extractor handle those.
• Images and scans: a picture of a document contains no text until it is recognised; the image text extractor does that.
• Password-protected documents: the text is encrypted and cannot be read without the password. Remove it in Word and convert the result.

Most converters return the body of the document and nothing else, because the body is the easy part. Everything below is a separate switch, and each one is off or on by default for a reason.

• Headers and footers: included by default. A letterhead, a document title or a page footer is content, and dropping it silently is the single most common gap in other converters.
• Footnotes and endnotes: included by default, each numbered so you can tell which is which. They are stored in their own part of the document and appear after the body.
• Comments: left out by default, and labelled with their author when switched on. A reviewer's remarks are about the document rather than part of it.
• Text boxes: included by default. Pull quotes and captions in floating boxes are ordinary content that happens to be positioned.
• Hidden text: left out by default. Text the document marks as hidden was hidden on purpose.
• Deleted text: never included. Words removed under tracked changes are still in the file, and putting them back would silently contradict the document.
• Field codes: never included, but their results are. A date field contributes the date it shows, not the instruction that produced it.

Plain text cannot carry a font, but it can carry structure, and how much of it survives is the difference between text you can use and text you have to re-type.

• Tables as rows: each row becomes one line with tab-separated cells, which is what a spreadsheet expects when you paste it. A table nested inside a cell is folded into that cell so the outer row keeps its shape.
• Tables as paragraphs: every cell becomes its own paragraph instead, which reads better in prose and is what most other converters do whether you want it or not.
• List markers: bullets and numbers are rebuilt from the document's own list definitions, so 1., 1.a), 1.b), 2. comes out with the parent number the nested items belong to.
• Line breaks: a break inside a paragraph is kept as a line break. Addresses, verse and signature blocks depend on this, and a converter that drops it welds two lines into one word.
• Page breaks: shown as a blank line by default, or as a form feed for software that expects one, or ignored entirely.
• Blank lines: kept, collapsed to one, or removed, for documents that use empty paragraphs as spacing.

These two settings cause more confusion than anything else about plain text, because a .txt file records neither of them. Getting them right at the point of export is the only reliable fix.

• UTF-8: the default and the right answer almost everywhere: the web, macOS, Linux, and any modern editor.
• UTF-8 with BOM: the same bytes with a three-byte marker in front. Windows Notepad and Excel need it, and without it every accented or non-Latin character is mangled on open.
• UTF-16: two bytes per character, always with a byte-order marker. Some older Windows software still expects it.
• LF line endings: one byte per line ending. The default, and what macOS, Linux, and every developer tool expect.
• CRLF line endings: two bytes per line ending, expected by Windows Notepad and by a lot of older Windows software.

Plain text is the format every other program can read. Converting a Word document to text strips the styling that stops content being reused and leaves the words themselves, ready to paste into a content management system, feed to a script, diff against another version, or archive in a format that will still open in thirty years.

Benefits of Text Format

• Universal: a .txt file opens in every editor, on every operating system, with no software to install.
• Small: text is a fraction of the size of the document it came from, because none of the layout is carried.
• Searchable and scriptable: plain text is what grep, spreadsheets, data pipelines and language models expect as input.
• Diff-friendly: two text files can be compared line by line, which two Word documents cannot.
• Durable: a plain text file has no version, no schema and no dependency on the program that wrote it.

A Word document is not a page of text with formatting sprinkled on it. It is a package of separate parts, and the words are spread across them: the body in one part, each header and footer in another, footnotes, endnotes and comments in three more, and anything inside a text box nested somewhere in the middle. Converting to text means visiting all of them and deciding what belongs in the result.

Conversion Process

• Identify the file: the document is recognised by its contents rather than its extension, so a renamed file still opens and a file that is not a document is refused with a link to the tool that handles it.
• Read only what is needed: a DOCX or ODT is a compressed archive, and a picture-heavy document is mostly pictures. Only the parts that hold text are expanded; the images are never touched.
• Walk the document: paragraphs, runs, tables, lists, notes and text boxes are collected into a structure that keeps the order and the shape of the original.
• Write the text: your choices decide which zones appear, how tables and lists are written, how paragraphs are separated, and which line endings and encoding the file uses.

A few things about the format that explain what plain text can and cannot carry.

Key Statistics

• A .docx, .docm, .dotx and .dotm are the same container with different labels, so all four convert identically.
• A legacy .doc keeps its text in pieces that must be reassembled in reading order; the pieces are not stored in the order you read them.
• Headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes and comments live outside the document body, which is why so many converters drop them.
• A line break inside a paragraph and the end of a paragraph are different things in Word, and both are preserved here.
• Text marked as deleted under tracked changes is stored in the file, and including it would restore words the author removed.
• Plain text carries no encoding marker, which is why the UTF-8 with BOM option exists for Windows software.

A few habits that make the output land cleanly wherever it is going.

Quality Considerations

• Check the preview before downloading; it is the exact text the file will contain, not an approximation of it.
• Turn off headers and footers when the same letterhead repeats on every page and you only want the body.
• Keep tables as tab-separated rows if the text is going into a spreadsheet, and switch to paragraphs if it is going into prose.
• Choose UTF-8 with BOM if the file will be opened in Windows Notepad or imported into Excel, and CRLF if it is going to older Windows software.
• Turn on hyperlink addresses when the links matter; the link text alone loses where each one pointed.
• Use 'Remove blank lines' when the document has empty paragraphs used as spacing.

Common Use Cases

• Publishing: move a manuscript into a content management system without carrying Word's styling into the page.
• Data work: pull tables out of reports as tab-separated rows that a spreadsheet or script can read.
• Review: compare two versions of a contract line by line, which is impossible while both are Word files.
• Archiving: keep a readable copy of a document in a format that has no version and no dependency.
• Accessibility: get the underlying words out of a heavily formatted document for a screen reader or a plain-language rewrite.
• AI and search: prepare clean text for indexing, summarising or embedding, without markup noise.

There is no upload step in this tool because there is no server doing the work. Your document is read inside the page, on your own machine, and the text never travels anywhere. That is a practical difference rather than a slogan: there is no queue, no daily conversion limit, no file waiting on someone else's disk, and no size cap other than what your own device can hold.

• Nothing is uploaded: the file is opened directly from your disk and read in place.
• Nothing is stored: close the tab and the document and its text are gone.
• It works offline: once the page has loaded, conversion keeps working with no connection at all.
• No queue, no daily limit: the work happens on your machine, so there is nothing to wait behind.

Documents are read on your device with a purpose-built reader, so nothing is uploaded and nothing waits in a queue.

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