Convert Word DOCX to plain text
Extract clean plain text from Word .docx files with paragraph breaks intact, smart-quote straightening and batch ZIP export. Nothing is uploaded.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
How to extract plain text from a Word document
- Drop one or more
.docxfiles onto the page. Nothing is uploaded — the documents are unzipped and read in this tab. - Choose the paragraph spacing. A blank line between paragraphs reads best; one line per paragraph is easier to process with a script.
- Tidy the text by trimming indentation, collapsing runs of blank lines, and optionally straightening Word’s curly quotes.
- Copy or download. With several documents loaded you can export all of them as a single ZIP of
.txtfiles.
What gets extracted
| Document part | Included |
|---|---|
| Body paragraphs and headings | Yes, in reading order |
| Bulleted and numbered list text | Yes — the text, not the bullet glyphs |
| Table cell text | Yes, cell by cell |
| Text boxes and shapes | Usually, when stored in the main document part |
| Headers, footers, footnotes, endnotes | No — separate parts of the package |
| Comments and tracked-change markup | No |
| Images, charts, embedded objects | No — plain text has nowhere to put them |
What a .docx actually is
Despite the single-file appearance, a .docx is a ZIP archive. Inside it,
word/document.xml holds the text as a tree of paragraph (w:p) and run
(w:r) elements, with formatting stored separately. Extracting text means unzipping the
package, walking that tree and emitting one line break per paragraph. That is exactly what happens here,
using the mammoth library compiled into the page — which is why it works offline and never needs a copy
of your file.
Why the old .doc format is not supported
Word 97-2003 .doc files use a completely different container: a binary OLE compound
document with the text spread across streams and piece tables. Reading it reliably needs a very different
parser, so the tool detects the format and tells you rather than producing garbled output. Open the file
in Word or LibreOffice, choose Save As → Word Document (.docx), and convert that copy.
Straightening smart quotes
Word’s autocorrect replaces typed punctuation with typographic characters: " becomes
“ ”, ' becomes ‘ ’, -- becomes an em dash, and
... becomes a single ellipsis character. Beautiful in print, awkward in a CSV, a JSON
string or a code comment. The straightening option maps them back to ASCII, and also converts
non-breaking spaces to ordinary ones — the invisible character that makes a value fail to match in a
lookup.
Common uses
- Getting a manuscript out of Word and into a plain-text editor or a static site.
- Preparing documents for search indexing, diffing or word-frequency analysis.
- Stripping formatting before pasting into a CMS that would otherwise inherit Word’s inline styles.
- Bulk-extracting text from a folder of reports — drop them all at once and take the ZIP.
If you want to keep the structure rather than flatten it, use DOCX to Markdown, which preserves headings, lists, links and tables.
Questions
Can it read old .doc files?
No. The binary .doc format from Word 97-2003 is not supported. Open the file in Word or LibreOffice and save it as .docx, then convert that copy here.
Are headers, footers and footnotes included?
The main document body is extracted, including tables as text. Headers, footers, comments and footnotes live in separate parts of the file and are not included.
Can I convert several documents at once?
Yes. Drop as many .docx files as you like, switch between them with the document picker, and download every result as a single ZIP.
What does “straighten smart quotes” do?
Word replaces typed quotes with curly “ ” ‘ ’ characters and en/em dashes. That option converts them back to plain ASCII, which matters when the text is going into code or a CSV.