Sometimes all you want from a Word file is the text. Copying it out of Word drags fonts and bullet characters into the next program, and a CMS, a translation tool or a coding script may choke on them. This converter writes the document's words to a plain .txt file that any editor, terminal or website form can read.
You can add a whole folder of .docx files at once and get one text file per document. Nothing is sent to a server: the files are opened and converted by your browser on your own device, which makes the tool suitable for manuscripts, legal drafts and anything else you would rather keep to yourself.
What ends up in the text file
Every paragraph of the document body becomes a block of text, and paragraphs are separated by exactly one blank line. Spaces at the end of lines are trimmed, and runs of empty paragraphs (the ones people use to push text down the page) are collapsed, so the file stays compact.
Structure that Word expresses through formatting is not written out. Headings appear as ordinary lines, list items lose their bullets and numbers, and each table cell becomes its own paragraph, read row by row from left to right. Hyperlinks keep their visible words but not the address behind them. Images, page headers and footers, footnotes and comments are left out. The output is UTF-8 encoded, so accented letters, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese and emoji are stored correctly.
Good reasons to convert Word to plain text
Counting words and characters
Editors, translators and students with a word limit need a reliable count. Paste the extracted text into Word Counter and you get words, characters and reading time without Word's own rules about what counts.
Preparing text for other software
Subtitle editors, text-to-speech engines, search indexes, AI assistants and scripts that analyse language all work best on plain text. A .txt file avoids the parsing errors that come with feeding them a .docx.
Comparing two versions of a document
Formatting changes make Word's own compare feature noisy. Extract both versions as text and run them through Text Compare to see exactly which sentences were added, removed or rewritten.
How the extraction works
A .docx file is a ZIP archive with the body text stored as XML. The converter first checks the file's signature, so a renamed old .doc or a password-protected document produces a clear message instead of a garbled result. It then reads the document with mammoth inside a Web Worker, collects the text of each paragraph in reading order and tidies the spacing as described above.
There are no options to set. Each input produces a file with the same name and a .txt extension, for example report.docx becomes report.txt. Converting is usually quick even for long documents, because no layout or images need to be processed.
Como usar esta ferramenta
- Drop one or more .docx files on the box above, or click Choose files. Each file can be up to 50 MB.
- Press Convert. Each file shows Done when its text is ready.
- Press Download next to a file to save its .txt version.
- With several documents, press Download all (.zip) to get every text file in one archive.
Limitations
- Old .doc files from Word 97-2003 are not supported. Save them as .docx in Word or LibreOffice first.
- Documents protected with a password to open cannot be read.
- Bullets and list numbers are not written, so a numbered procedure becomes a series of unnumbered paragraphs.
- Text inside headers, footers, footnotes and comments is not included.
- A manual line break (Shift+Enter) inside a paragraph is not written, so the words on either side of it can run together. Use real paragraphs, or DOCX to HTML, where those breaks are kept.
- Tables lose their grid: cells come out one per paragraph, which can be hard to follow for wide tables.