Convert DOCX to TXT — pull clean plain text from a Word document
Drop a Word DOCX below and get a plain-text .txt file with just the readable content. All formatting is stripped, nothing is uploaded.
Your file is processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
Sometimes you do not need the formatting, the fonts, the headings, the tables, or the images from a Word document — you just need the words. A word count, a corpus for analysis, an input to a script, a prompt for a language model, a text-only draft you can paste into any editor. For those workflows, converting DOCX to plain text is the fastest path. It throws away everything that is not readable content and hands you a .txt file that any tool on the planet can read.
This converter uses mammoth to read the DOCX document structure in your browser and extract just the paragraph text — no styles, no inline formatting, no images, no tables except as separated rows. The output is a UTF-8 encoded .txt file with paragraphs separated by line breaks. Your Word document never leaves your device; the entire extraction runs locally. This is the privacy-friendly way to get text out of a Word doc when you are uncomfortable uploading it to a third-party converter.
How to convert DOCX to TXT in 4 steps
- 1
Select your Word document
Drop the .docx file into the dropzone or click to browse. Any modern Word file (2007 and later) is accepted.
- 2
Let mammoth extract the raw text
The mammoth library reads the DOCX, walks every paragraph, and collects the text content into a single UTF-8 string.
- 3
Check the result
The result panel shows the size of the plain-text output. Tiny compared to the original DOCX because no formatting is carried over.
- 4
Download the TXT file
Save the .txt to your device. Open it in any editor, feed it to a script, copy it into another tool — plain text is universally readable.
DOCX vs TXT: full document versus just the words
DOCX carries the complete authoring state of a Word document — text, formatting, styles, comments, revision history, embedded images, tables, headers and footers. It is a zipped XML package with a lot of structure. A plain text file is just the bytes of the readable content, encoded in UTF-8 (or whatever encoding you choose), with line breaks separating paragraphs and nothing else. Converting from DOCX to TXT is a lossy operation in the sense that you throw away every visual decision the author made — font choices, bold runs, heading hierarchy, table layout, image placement — and keep only the words themselves. That is exactly what you want when the next tool in your pipeline only cares about text: search, analysis, text processing, or feeding into a language model.
When should you convert DOCX to TXT?
Feeding a Word document into a language model or script
Most scripts and language models want plain text, not binary Word files. Converting to TXT first gives you an input format they understand natively.
Counting words, characters, or lines
Any word counter, linguistic analyzer, or text processing tool can read a .txt file. The format is universally understood across decades of software.
Creating a grep-able archive
If you have a folder of Word files and you want to search across them with grep or ripgrep, converting to .txt first makes the whole archive searchable with standard Unix tools.
Copying content into a text-only editor
Some workflows (coding tools, plain-text editors, chat apps) do not accept pasted Word content cleanly. Going through .txt strips everything unpasteable and leaves pure content.
Frequently asked questions
- Does it keep formatting like bold or italic?
- No. Plain text cannot carry formatting by definition. Every character in the .txt output is just text — if you need to preserve bold, italic, headings, or any styling, convert to HTML or PDF instead.
- What about tables and lists?
- Tables are flattened into rows of text. Lists lose their bullets or numbers but keep the text of each item, separated by line breaks. The reading order is preserved.
- What character encoding does the output use?
- UTF-8 with no BOM. This handles accented characters, non-Latin scripts, and emoji correctly, and is readable by every modern text editor and command-line tool.
- Can I convert a password-protected Word document?
- No. Encrypted DOCX files cannot be read by mammoth. Remove the password in Word first (File → Info → Protect Document → Encrypt with Password, clear the field), save, and run the conversion.
- Is my Word document uploaded?
- No. mammoth runs in your browser, extracts the text locally, and the TXT is produced locally. Nothing is ever uploaded, logged, or stored on a server.