Convert Word to Text (TXT)

To convert Word to TXT, select or drop your .docx or .doc file on this page and press Convert to TXT. There is nothing to set, and you download a plain .txt file with the same name, so report.docx comes back as report.txt. Both Word formats take the same single step, so docx to text and doc to txt work the same way.

Use it when something accepts only plain text: a form or system that strips formatting, a script that reads the words, or software that opens nothing but .txt. Every word of the main text comes through, in the order it has in the document. The formatting does not, which is why this Word to text converter grades the route Words only. Here is what happened to each part of a test document:

The .txt file is saved as UTF-8, the standard text encoding that covers every alphabet, so no letter is swapped for a question mark. In our test é, ü, ñ, Ø, £, €, © and curly quotes all came through, and so did Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and an emoji. If you are loading the file into another system, these are the details it may ask about:

• Encoding: UTF-8 with a byte order mark (BOM), three invisible bytes at the very start that tell programs the file is UTF-8.
• Line endings: a line feed (LF) only, the Unix and macOS convention, not the carriage return and line feed pair (CRLF) that Windows programs have traditionally used.
• Tabs: kept as real tab characters, including the ones between table cells.

Most editors and import tools take all of this without complaint. Two cases to watch: a script or database import that does not expect a BOM may read it as stray characters (often ) at the start of the first line, and an old Windows program that wants CRLF may show the text as one long line. Many text editors can save a copy without the BOM or with Windows line endings.

Other documents give the same kind of .txt file. Get the text out of a PDF, with the English words of a scanned PDF read from the page first, strip a web page down to text without its tags and scripts, or convert RTF to text for a Rich Text file: in our test an RTF saved from the same Word file gave exactly the same .txt.

Going the other way, you can convert text to Word, but the formatting does not come back, because a .txt file never had any. If the place you are sending to can take a little formatting, convert Word to RTF instead: in our test the RTF kept the bold and italic text, the lists, the table, the link and the picture, in a file almost any word processor opens.