Word to Text

Word documents edit well and travel badly. Paste from Word into another tool and invisible formatting rides along, breaking layouts, confusing spell-checkers, and settling into databases as a mess of zero-width characters. The tool reads a .docx with the mammoth.js library and hands back plain text: each paragraph on its own line with a blank line between, headings and list items reduced to their bare words without bullet or number marks, and table cells each on a line of their own. Switch to the HTML tab when you want the structure kept, with headings, lists, and tables as markup ready to paste into a page or CMS.

What has no plain-text form drops out: images, charts, equations, and SmartArt. Tracked changes flatten to the visible version, and comments are left out, which is usually what you want. The output is ordinary Unicode, so every editor search and every find-and-replace handles it, which is the whole reason to convert.

Three things to know

Is there a file size limit?

Yes, 20 MB per document, which covers all but the most image-heavy files. The conversion runs in your browser, so the document never leaves your machine.

Does it read old .doc files or Google Docs?

Only .docx. mammoth.js does not read the old .doc format, and Google Docs keeps its own internal format. In either case, open the file and save or download it as .docx first, then bring it here.

Why are some characters coming out as question marks?

The source likely used a font with private-use glyphs that map to no real Unicode character, so there is nothing to extract. Replace those symbols with proper Unicode in Word before exporting.