Convert Word to PNG

Drop a Word file on the tool above, keep 150 DPI or pick another Resolution, and press Convert to PNG: that is the whole of a DOCX to PNG conversion here. Older Word 97 files take the same three steps, so DOC to PNG works too, and every page of the document comes back as a PNG image of its own.

PNG is lossless. Each pixel of the page is stored exactly as it was drawn, so small type, thin table borders and the lines of a chart keep hard, clean edges, even when someone zooms in. That makes it the better picture format for pages that are mostly words: a contract clause pasted onto a slide, a page for a help article or a manual, or a form for an upload box that only takes images.

Two things change on the way. Photos cost space: one page holding a large photo came to 667 KB as a PNG, so for pages like that you can save the pages as smaller JPGs. And the words turn into pixels, so nobody can select, search or edit them in the PNG.

Other documents become PNGs here as well: convert PowerPoint to PNG for one picture per slide, convert HTML to PNG for a saved web page, and convert text to PNG for a plain .txt file. Both of the last two are laid out on A4 pages first.

Resolution, in dots per inch (DPI), sets how many pixels each page gets. This Word to PNG converter offers 96, 150 or 300 DPI, with 150 picked for you. These are the sizes our test pages came out at:

Pick 96 DPI when the page will only be seen on a screen, keep 150 DPI for slides and documents, and choose 300 DPI for print or for fine print that people will zoom into.

A one-page document comes back as a single PNG with the same name: letter.docx gives letter.png. Two pages or more arrive together in one ZIP named after your document, numbered with three digits so they stay in order in any folder: report.docx gave report.zip, holding report-p001.png, report-p002.png and report-p003.png. Behind the button, the document is saved as a PDF first and each PDF page is then drawn as a PNG. If you already have that PDF, turn a PDF into PNGs directly.

Each document has a 100-page limit. A Word file only gets its page count once it has been laid out, so a longer one is refused after that step, with a message giving the count it came to. Our 100-page test gave a ZIP of 100 PNGs, about 13 MB in all at 150 DPI.

Our server has no Microsoft fonts. Calibri, Arial and Times New Roman are drawn in free fonts made to the same widths, so the text takes the same room on each line as in Word. Aptos, the default in newer versions of Word, has no such twin and is drawn in Liberation Sans, so check where the lines end in an Aptos document.

Every PNG from this page has a solid background and no transparency (no alpha channel). Where the Word page is blank, the picture is white. We placed a logo with a see-through background in a document to check: around the logo, the PNG came back plain white. So a logo or signature made in Word cannot come out of this conversion with a transparent background.

A page colour set on the Design tab in Word does come through, and it fills the whole picture, margins included: our pale yellow test page came back yellow from edge to edge.