DOCX to TXT
Sometimes you need the words and nothing else. A DOCX file wraps your text in fonts, colors, styles, images, and layout, but there are plenty of situations where all that formatting is baggage: feeding text into a script, pasting into a plain-text field, importing into a tool that chokes on rich formatting, or reducing a document to a tiny, universally readable file. Converting DOCX to TXT strips everything except the raw text, leaving a plain file that opens instantly in any editor on any system. FluidConvert extracts the plain text from your Word document free in your browser, with no account and no install, giving you clean, unformatted text ready to reuse anywhere.
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Accepts: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document, .docx · Max 1GB · always free
Your files are encrypted with TLS and automatically deleted after conversion.
Simply upload your .DOCX file and we'll convert it to .TXT format — fast, free, and secure.
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How to Convert DOCX to TXT
Upload Your File
Click the upload area above or drag and drop your .DOCX file. We support files up to 1GB, completely free.
Choose Output Format
Select .TXT as your target format. Adjust any conversion settings if needed.
Download Your File
Click Convert Now and wait a few seconds. Once complete, download your converted file instantly.
About DOCX to TXT
Last updated: August 2026
What is DOCX?
DOCX is the default document format for Microsoft Word since Word 2007, when Microsoft replaced the old binary DOC with the XML-based Office Open XML standard. A DOCX file is actually a zipped package of XML files describing the text along with its fonts, paragraph styles, colors, tables, embedded images, headers, footers, comments, and tracked changes. That rich structure is what makes Word documents so capable, but it also means a DOCX carries far more than the words themselves, and other programs need to understand its format to read it correctly.
Why convert to TXT?
Plain text (TXT) is the lowest common denominator of digital documents: pure characters with no formatting, readable by literally every text editor, terminal, and programming language on every operating system. You convert to TXT when formatting is irrelevant or actively in the way, such as feeding content into a script or command-line tool, pasting into a system that only accepts plain text, stripping hidden metadata and tracked changes, creating a tiny file for maximum compatibility, or preparing clean input for data processing. A TXT file is future-proof and will open unchanged decades from now.
What to expect from the conversion
Be clear-eyed about this one: DOCX to TXT keeps the text and discards everything else. Fonts, sizes, colors, bold and italics, headings, tables, images, charts, headers, footers, comments, and hyperlink styling are all removed, because plain text has no way to represent them. The words remain, along with paragraph breaks, but a table typically flattens into lines of text and images simply vanish. This is intentional and not a defect. The upside is a dramatically smaller, perfectly portable file. If you need any formatting preserved, TXT is the wrong target and a format like PDF or HTML fits better.
How FluidConvert handles it
Your DOCX is uploaded over an encrypted connection and processed on secure servers that parse the Word document's XML and extract just the textual content into a clean, standard TXT file. Paragraph breaks are preserved so the text stays readable. Files are automatically deleted from our servers about an hour after conversion, and the whole process is free with no account required.
Common reasons to convert DOCX to TXT
- Extracting the raw text from a Word document to feed into a script, data pipeline, or command-line tool
- Stripping formatting, comments, and tracked changes to share a clean, plain version of a document
- Pasting document content into a system or form field that only accepts plain text
- Creating a tiny, universally readable copy of a document that opens on any device or old system
- Preparing clean text input for programming, search indexing, or importing into a database
Frequently Asked Questions
Will I lose my formatting when converting DOCX to TXT?
Yes, completely, and that is the point of the format. Plain text cannot store fonts, colors, bold, italics, headings, or any styling, so all of it is removed and only the raw words and paragraph breaks remain. If preserving formatting matters, TXT is the wrong choice. Convert to PDF or HTML instead. Choose TXT specifically when you want the text stripped clean of everything else.
What happens to images and tables in my document?
Images are dropped entirely, since a plain-text file has no way to embed or reference a picture. Tables lose their grid structure and typically collapse into lines of text, with the cell contents run together or separated by spaces or tabs depending on the layout. If your document is mostly tables or figures, the TXT output will be sparse. TXT is best suited to text-heavy documents where the words are what matter.
Does the TXT file remove tracked changes and comments?
Yes. Because only the main body text is extracted, Word features like tracked changes, comments, and hidden metadata are left behind. This makes DOCX to TXT a handy way to sanitize a document down to just its readable content before sharing. Note that the extracted text reflects the current document text, not a log of edits, so revision history is not preserved in any form.
Which character encoding does the output use?
The TXT is written in a standard Unicode encoding (UTF-8), which correctly represents accented characters, symbols, and non-Latin scripts. This matters because plain text has no formatting to fall back on, so getting the encoding right is what keeps characters like curly quotes, em dashes, and international letters intact. UTF-8 is the modern default and is understood by essentially every editor and programming environment.
Can I convert the TXT back into a DOCX later?
You can convert TXT back to DOCX, but the formatting that was stripped will not return, because it no longer exists in the file. You would get a Word document containing your text in a default font with no styling, which you would then have to format from scratch. The conversion to TXT is a one-way loss of formatting, so keep the original DOCX if you might need its layout again.