DOCX to HTML

How to use

1. Pick the .docx. Drag it onto the box or use Choose file, whichever is quicker.
2. Hit Convert to HTML. A long document takes a moment while Mammoth unzips the file and walks its XML.
3. The Preview tab opens first. Check that headings look like headings and that your tables kept their rows.
4. Switch to the HTML tab to read the markup itself. Anything you styled from Word's style menu shows up as a real tag here; anything you formatted by eye shows up as a plain p.
5. Use the copy button if you are pasting into a CMS or an email template. It gives you body markup only, with no html or head wrapper.
6. Take Download .html if you want a file you can open on its own. It saves under the source name with the extension swapped, so brief.docx becomes brief.html.

About this tool

Word's own Save as Web Page output is notorious: conditional comments, mso- prefixed properties, spans wrapped around single characters. DOCX to HTML takes the other route. Mammoth rebuilds the document from its structure, so a paragraph styled Heading 2 becomes an h2 and a bulleted list becomes a ul, nested up to five levels deep if that is how it was written.

Pictures embedded in the document come through as base64 data URIs inside the img tags. That keeps the result to a single self-contained file, and for a photo-heavy report it also makes that file very large. The Output view toggle above the result switches between the rendered preview and the source, and each pane scrolls inside its own 32rem window rather than pushing the rest of the page down.

Copy HTML hands over the inner markup on its own, ready to paste inside a template you already have. Download .html wraps that same markup in a small complete page you can open directly. If Markdown suits the job better, DOCX to Markdown feeds this exact HTML through Turndown, and DOCX to Text throws the tags away and keeps the words.

From a Word draft to the CMS, with one lesson on the way

A 2,000-word draft with two photos converts in a beat, and the Preview tab looks right until the third heading, which reads as ordinary body text. The HTML tab explains it: that one was never given a heading style in Word, just bolded and enlarged by eye, so Mammoth honestly calls it a p.

Apply Heading 2 to it back in Word, convert again, and the outline is clean. Copy HTML then hands the CMS a fragment with real h2s, real lists and the photos riding along as data URIs, and the site's own stylesheet takes it from there.

Good to know

• Fidelity is traded for cleanliness on purpose. Word colours, fonts, multi-column layout and text boxes are dropped, and underlined text loses its underline because Mammoth has no default tag for that one, which leaves your own stylesheet in charge of how the page ends up looking.
• Content that lives outside the main text flow can convert to nothing at all. A flyer built from text boxes comes back empty, and the status line reports that no readable content was found rather than inventing a layout for it.

Frequently asked questions