Convert DOC to DOCX with nothing to install

To convert DOC to DOCX, press Select DOC file and pick your .doc, or drop it on this page, then press Convert to DOCX and download the new file. It keeps its name, so minutes.doc comes back as minutes.docx. The change happens on our server, so you need neither Word nor anything else installed.

A .doc is the file Word saved from Word 97 to Word 2003. Since Word 2007 it has saved .docx instead: a zip archive of XML files, with the text in word/document.xml and the pictures in a media folder, built the same way as an OpenDocument file, as our guide to what an .odt file is for explains.

Old .doc files still turn up in archives, shared drives and email attachments, and the person or form you are sending one to may ask for .docx. If the file is only going to become a PDF, skip this step: Word to PDF opens a .doc as it is.

This pair is graded Exact: one step, with nothing rebuilt or guessed on the way. To see what that means in practice, we made a two-page Word 97 file holding the things documents usually hold, converted it here and took the .docx apart. All of this came through:

• headings, still in Word's Heading 1 and Heading 2 styles;
• bold, italic, underlined and coloured text, with accents and Greek letters intact;
• bulleted and numbered lists, and a table with its borders, a shaded top row and a merged cell;
• pictures, byte for byte: a PNG and a JPEG photo came out identical to the ones that went in, so nothing was recompressed;
• the header, and a footer whose page number still counts 1, 2;
• a footnote, a web link, a reviewer's comment and tracked changes, with the reviewer's name and the date;
• the A4 page size and margins, and the title and author saved in the file's properties.

In both tests the new file was the smaller one: 16 KB as a .doc became 11 KB as a .docx, and a .doc with a photo in it went from 130 KB to 116 KB.

One thing carries over that you may not expect. The .docx keeps a setting from the .doc that tells Word to lay the document out by Word 2003's rules, which keeps it looking as it did. Because of that, Word can open it in Compatibility Mode, which Microsoft says turns off newer Word features until the file is converted in Word, as the next section shows.

If Word is on your computer, it can change DOC to DOCX itself. Open the .doc, choose File, then Info, then Convert, and save. Or choose File, then Save As, pick Word Document as the file type and make sure Maintain compatibility with previous versions of Word is not ticked. Those are Microsoft's steps for Word 2016 and later, Microsoft 365 included. Microsoft also notes that Convert lays the document out as current Word would, so check that page breaks have not moved. The same Convert step works on a .docx made here.

This DOC to DOCX converter is the easier route when Word is not installed, or when you are on a work or library computer where you cannot install it. With a folder of old files, Pro and Business take up to 100 at once, where the steps above go one document at a time.

Going the other way? Convert DOCX to DOC for software from before 2007. If all you have is a PDF of the document, convert PDF to Word instead, or convert PDF to ODT for LibreOffice: both rebuild the document from the PDF's pages, so expect the odd margin or line break to move.