Convert text to Word from a plain .txt file

To convert text to Word, select or drop your .txt file on this page, keep DOCX under Word version, press Convert to DOCX and download the document. It is one step on our server, graded Exact: every word, space and line break arrives as text you can edit, and the name stays, so notes.txt comes back as notes.docx.

A .txt file holds the words and nothing else: no fonts, no headings, no page. That suits a quick note, but not a letter, a report or a draft someone else has to review. Once the words are in Word you can add headings and bold, set up the page for printing, track changes and send a .docx to whoever asked for one. Notes typed on a phone, a log written by a program and a draft from Notepad all go through this text to Word converter the same way.

Need the opposite? Convert Word to text to strip a document back to its words. For a saved web page, convert HTML to Word instead: it keeps the headings, lists and tables that a .txt file never had. A Rich Text .rtf already has formatting of its own: convert RTF to Word to keep it.

Both come from this page. Under Word version, DOCX (Word) is picked for you; DOC (Word 97) is the older format, and the page suggests it only for software from before 2007. Either way the conversion is one step, graded Exact, and the document inside is the same: in our test the same note came back with the same words, font and layout in both.

Choose .docx unless something asks for .doc, such as an old copy of Word or an upload form that accepts nothing else. That is the one reason to go from TXT to DOC. And if the layout must not change at all once you send it, convert text to PDF instead.

Nothing is rewritten or tidied. The document reads the way the text file did, which makes the result easy to predict:

• Each line of the .txt becomes its own paragraph, and a blank line stays as an empty paragraph, so your spacing survives.
• Every paragraph uses the Preformatted Text style: Liberation Mono at 10 pt, a fixed-width font, with no extra space between paragraphs. If your computer does not have Liberation Mono, Word shows a substitute.
• The page is A4 with 2 cm margins.
• A long line stays one paragraph and wraps at the edge of the page. Lines you ended with Enter in your editor stay separate, one paragraph each.
• Tabs stay as tabs, and runs of spaces stay as spaces, so columns lined up with spaces still line up.
• Markdown is not read: a # heading or a * bullet arrives as the characters you typed, and a web address in the text is plain text, not a link.

A table typed with tabs is still lines of text in Word, not a Word table. Select those lines and use Insert, Table, Convert Text to Table, with tabs as the separator, to make one. For a table stuck in a PDF, our guide on how to convert PDF to Word with tables intact explains what breaks and what to check. For a photo of a typed page rather than a text file, convert JPG to Word: the words in the photo are read as text and can be misread, so check them afterwards.

Our server first looks at how your file was saved. A file that reads as UTF-8 is taken as UTF-8; any other file is read as Western ANSI (Windows-1252), the encoding older Windows editors used for English and Western European text. Here is what came through in our tests:

The letters are stored as text, not drawn, so Word shows them with the fonts on your computer. A language your computer has a font for will display; one it has no font for shows empty boxes until you add one.