DOCX to Text Converter (Word & ODT)

Copying text out of a Word file by hand drags fonts, colours and tracked changes along with it. Drop a .docx or .odt here instead and this DOCX to Text converter reads the document’s XML directly, returning clean plain text or Markdown you can paste anywhere.

Headings, bulleted and numbered lists, line breaks and tables survive. You decide whether headers, footers and footnotes come along. Nothing is uploaded, because the file is unzipped and parsed inside this tab.

Worked Example: An Invoice With Tracked Changes

Take a short invoice in Word with a title, a tabbed total and one edit still tracked:

• The Title paragraph Invoice INV-2041 becomes # Invoice INV-2041 in Markdown
• Total, a tab and $1,250.00 keep the real tab character between them
• “Pay by Friday Monday” comes out as Pay by Monday.: deletions are dropped, insertions kept
• A PAGE field prints its result, 3, never the field code itself
• With Footnotes & endnotes ticked, the note appears under its own heading at the end

Format Notes: Plain Text Versus Markdown

Plain text marks list items with bullets indented two spaces per level and separates table cells with tabs, which paste cleanly into a spreadsheet. Markdown turns Word’s Heading 1–6 and Title styles into # to ######, lists into - items, and tables into pipe tables with any | inside a cell escaped. ODT headings are recognised whether they are true outline headings or paragraphs built on a Heading style.

Text boxes are read once even though Word stores them twice for older readers. Images are skipped, and the result notes how many. The word and character counts under the box update when you switch formats.

What Happens When a File Won't Open

Files up to 50 MB are accepted. A Word 97–2003 .doc, or a .docx saved with a password, is a different container entirely and gets “This is an older Word .doc file or a password-protected document. Open it in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs, save it as .docx, and try again.” PowerPoint and Excel files are recognised and named rather than failing silently, and an OpenDocument spreadsheet is refused because only .odt text documents are supported.