DOCX to TXT
BetaTurn Word .docx files into plain UTF-8 text. Copy the text, or download a .txt for each file; drop several and get them in one .zip. Runs in your browser.
- Free, no sign-up
- Updated
- Reviewed by Olgun Ozoktas
- Runs in your browser
- No uploads
- Never modifies your file
Plain text only. Formatting, images, comments, headers and footers are not kept, and list bullets and numbers are left out because Word generates them rather than storing them as text. Your document is read in this tab and is not uploaded.
How to convert DOCX to TXT
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Drop the .docx files
Drag one or more Word documents onto the drop area, or click to choose them. Each one is converted as soon as it is read. -
Pick the spacing
Keep a blank line between paragraphs, or turn it off to put each paragraph on the next line. Collapse extra blank lines turns runs of empty paragraphs into one blank line. -
Check the text
Each file shows its word and character counts and a read-only preview of the text you will get. -
Copy or download
Copy the text, or download it as a .txt named after the document: report.docx becomes report.txt. With several files, Download all gives one .zip.
Common uses
Feeding text to a script or a search index
Pasting into a plain-text field
Counting or comparing words
Archiving the words of a folder of documents
Why convert a Word file to plain text?
DOCX to TXT pulls the readable text out of Word documents. A .docx is a zip, and the body text lives in word/document.xml. This page opens the package in your browser, walks that part in order and writes what a reader sees as plain UTF-8: one block per paragraph, a newline for a line break, a tab for a tab, and one line per table row with the cells separated by tabs.
What is left out is everything plain text cannot carry: fonts, bold and italic, images, comments, headers and footers, and list bullets and numbers, which Word generates from the list settings rather than storing as text. Tracked changes are read the way Word shows them with all changes accepted, so deleted words do not appear. Field codes are dropped and their results kept, so a page number field gives the number.
Two options shape the spacing: a blank line between paragraphs (on by default), and collapsing runs of empty paragraphs into one blank line (on by default). Change either and the text updates without dropping the file again.
The file is only read. Nothing is written back into it, and the conversion runs in the tab.
How it compares
Word can do this one file at a time: Save As, Plain Text, then an encoding dialog. It needs Word, and a folder means repeating it for every file.
Copying from Word and pasting into a plain editor works for one document and gives you no control of the spacing.
Libraries such as mammoth have a raw-text mode, and it is a fine choice in code. In its raw-text output a line break inside a paragraph produces nothing, so two lines run together, and each table cell becomes a separate paragraph. This page reads the document part directly so line breaks and table rows survive.
For structure rather than words, use DOCX to Markdown or DOCX to HTML. For subtitles to text, there is SRT to TXT, and for markup you already have as text, HTML Stripper.
Tips
- A line break typed with Shift+Enter stays a line break, and a tab stays a tab.
- Each table row comes out as one line, with its cells separated by tabs, so a table pastes into a spreadsheet in columns.
- Tracked changes are read as Word shows them with all changes accepted: inserted words are in, deleted words are out. To resolve them in the .docx itself, use DOCX Accept Track Changes.
- Need headings and lists kept? DOCX to Markdown keeps the structure; this page keeps only the words.
- The .txt is UTF-8 with no byte order mark and LF line endings, which every current editor opens, including Notepad.
- A scanned page is an image, not text. A document made of scans comes out empty here; it needs OCR instead.