DOCX to Text

How to use the docx to text

1. Choose a .docx file, or drag it onto the page.
2. Read the extracted text and check the counts.
3. Copy it, or download it as a .txt file.

About this tool

Getting the text out of a Word document usually means opening Word, or uploading the file to a converter. Neither is appealing when the document is a contract, a medical letter or an unpublished draft — which is most of the documents people need to do this with.

Structure is kept where it survives the move to plain text: headings stay on their own lines, list items keep their bullets and their nesting as indentation, and table rows come out with their cells separated by tabs, so a row pasted into a spreadsheet lands in the right columns.

What is dropped is dropped deliberately rather than by accident. Word stores comments, footnotes, headers, footers and tracked changes in separate parts of the archive, so pulling the document body gives you the document as it reads, not as it was argued over. That is usually what is wanted, and the page says so rather than leaving someone to discover a missing footnote.

A `.docx` is a ZIP archive of XML, which is why this works with no server at all: the archive is opened in the tab and the document part read directly. What comes out is the body — headings, lists, tables and bold or italic runs. Headers, footers, footnotes, comments and tracked changes live in separate parts of the archive and are not included, and images are not extracted. A `.doc` from before 2007 is a different, binary format and cannot be read here.

Common uses

• Getting the text out of a document without opening Word.
• Preparing a document's contents for a system that takes plain text.
• Reading a .docx on a machine that has no word processor.

Frequently asked questions

Can it open a .doc file?

No. The older .doc is a binary format with nothing in common with .docx, which is a ZIP of XML. Save it as .docx first, or open it in a word processor.

Are comments and tracked changes included?

No. Those live in separate parts of the archive, so what you get is the document as it reads rather than as it was argued over.

Is the document uploaded?

No. The archive is unzipped and parsed in this browser tab, which is the point — the documents people need this for are usually the ones they should not upload.