Convert Word to Text
Convert Word documents to Text free, in your browser.
Change the format. Drop an image, a PDF or a Word document.
- JPG · PNG · WebP · Text · Word
- Word
- PDF · Text
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Stripping a Word document down to plain text is what you do when the formatting is in the way. Pasting into code, feeding a script, diffing two drafts, searching with ordinary command-line tools, or keeping something readable for a decade without depending on Microsoft.
The words survive, in order, with the paragraph breaks between them. Headings become ordinary lines, and list items keep their bullet or number as literal characters, because a .txt file has no idea what a heading or a list is. Everything else goes: fonts, sizes, bold and italic, colours, tables, images, headers, footers and page numbers. None of that is text, so none of it can be in a text file.
That is usually the point rather than a loss. Plain text is the one format nothing can misread and nothing can quietly reformat, and it is the reason this conversion exists at all. Only .docx is read here: the older .doc is a different, undocumented binary from before Microsoft published a format, and Word will save it as .docx in a few seconds.
How to convert Word to Text
- Drop your Word files onto the box above, or paste them with Ctrl+V.
- Save each file from its tile, or take them all at once.
Word and Text side by side
| Word | Text | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it came from | 2007, when Office moved to an XML format | Older than the web, and unchanged since |
| Where it opens | Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and Pages | Everything that can read a file at all |
| Best at | A document still being written, where the structure has to stay editable | Words you want to search, script against, or keep for decades |
More on choosing between JPG, PNG, WebP and AVIF.
Questions about Word to Text
What happens to tables?
They come out as their contents, cell by cell, in reading order, with no grid around them. A three-column price list becomes lines of text with the columns run together, which is readable but not a table. There is no honest alternative: a text file has no concept of a column, and any attempt to fake one with spaces breaks the moment somebody opens it in a different font. If the table is the point, keep the .docx.
Are tracked changes and comments included?
No. You get the document as it currently reads with changes accepted, and comments are left out entirely. That is usually what you want from a text export, but it is worth knowing if you were hoping to extract a review thread. It also means the text file does not carry the names attached to those comments, which the .docx does; <a href="/remove-metadata">Clean</a> covers what a Word file records about who worked on it.
Why is .doc not supported?
Because it is an undocumented binary format from a time when Microsoft did not publish one, and nothing in a browser can reliably open it. A .docx is a zip file of XML, which is why it can be read here honestly and quickly. The fix takes seconds: open the .doc in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs and save it as .docx, and this then works normally.
Does the line spacing come out sensibly?
Yes. Paragraphs are separated by line breaks, so the shape of the document survives even though its styling does not. Line breaks inside a paragraph, the kind Word inserts with shift-return, are kept as breaks rather than merged. What you will not get is the visual spacing that came from paragraph styles, since that is a measurement in points and a text file has no way to express one.
Other conversions
Word also converts to PDF.
Text also comes from PDF.