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DOCX to Text

Convert a .docx to text and keep only the words, with Word's fonts and spacing left behind. Copy the result or save a .txt that keeps the document's name.

Runs entirely in your browser — your files and text never leave your device.

Drag & drop your file here, or

How to use

  1. Point the Word file box at your .docx, or drag the file straight onto it.
  2. Press Convert to text. The status line next to the button reads Reading document while it works, then Done.
  3. Read what came out in the Plain text box. It shows sixteen rows and scrolls, and the bottom edge drags down if you want more of it visible at once.
  4. Take the text away with the copy button, or with Download .txt if you want the file.
  5. If the flattening went too far, the same document opens in DOCX to Markdown or DOCX to HTML with its structure intact.

About this tool

Word documents carry a lot of baggage. Paste one straight into a CMS box or an email and the fonts and the odd spacing come with it, and then you're cleaning up by hand. Converting the .docx to text throws the styling away and hands back the words. Drop the file in, press Convert to text, and the document lands in the box below as flat lines you can read.

Reading is done by Mammoth, a .docx parser that walks the document and collects the text runs paragraph by paragraph. What comes back is reading order: the title, then the body, then whatever text was sitting inside the tables. Bullet markers never appear, because Word stores a list as a numbering property on the paragraph rather than as characters, and there are no characters there to extract. Links keep their words and lose their URLs.

Raw extraction is messier than you'd expect, so the text gets a cleanup pass before it reaches the box. Every paragraph ends up with one blank line after it. Empty paragraphs, the ones people leave behind from hammering Enter, collapse instead of stacking, and you never end up with more than one blank line in a row. Trailing spaces at the end of a line go too. Tabs inside a paragraph survive, which is enough to keep a hand-aligned column list readable.

I built this for the moment you need words somewhere plain: a code comment, a text editor, a form that mangles rich paste. If the structure matters, DOCX to Markdown keeps headings and lists as markup, and DOCX to HTML keeps them as tags. Both take the same file. For a count of what came out, the Word & Character Counter is one paste away.

One file, start to finish

Say the file is q3-notes.docx: a title, four paragraphs, a five-item bulleted list and a table with six cells. Press Convert to text and the box fills with sixteen blocks of text, one for each of those, separated by a single blank line. The bullets arrive as five bare lines. The table arrives as six, left to right and then down, with nothing marking where the row ended.

Download .txt saves it as q3-notes.txt. The copy button beside it puts the same text on the clipboard, which is what I reach for when the destination is an email I'm already writing.

Good to know

  • Only the modern .docx opens here. A Word 97-2003 .doc is a different, binary format, and the file gets checked before parsing, so an old one comes back with a note telling you to re-save it rather than a page of garbage. Everything visual is gone by design: images and colors drop out, bold and headings flatten into ordinary words, and a link keeps its text while the URL disappears.

Frequently asked questions

Do the bullet points survive?

The words do, the dots don't. Word keeps list numbering as a property of the paragraph rather than as characters in the text, and raw extraction only sees characters. A five-item list comes back as five bare lines. If you need the markers, convert to Markdown instead.

It won't take my .doc file. What do I do?

Open it in Word, Google Docs or LibreOffice and use Save As to make a .docx, then bring that back here. The check is strict on purpose. A .doc from Word 97-2003 uses an old binary format with none of the XML underneath that a browser can read.

What happens to a table?

Each cell's text comes through as its own block, in reading order across the row and then down. Nothing marks where one row ended and the next began, so a wide table is hard to follow afterwards. For a table worth keeping, DOCX to HTML is the better door.

Why is there a blank line between every paragraph?

That's how the extraction marks a paragraph boundary, and it keeps the output readable. Stacking is what gets removed. Six presses of Enter between two sections collapse down to a single blank line, and trailing spaces at the end of a line are trimmed off.

Can I get a word count from the text?

Not in here. Copy the output and paste it into the Word & Character Counter, which gives you words, characters, sentences and reading time. Doing it in that order counts the text you actually extracted.

Does the .txt keep the name of my document?

Yes. contract-v3.docx downloads as contract-v3.txt, so a folder of converted files still lines up with the originals.

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