How to Convert DOCX to TXT for Free: What Is Kept and What Is Lost
A .docx file can become plain text without leaving your device, but plain text has no room for most of what a Word file contains. Here is what we tested, element by element, and how it compares with LibreOffice.
Short answer: ClearConvert converts a .docx file to plain text inside your browser, so the document is never uploaded. You get the text of the body in order, with one blank line between paragraphs. Formatting, link addresses, list markers, footnotes, headers and footers do not survive, tables lose their rows, and tracked changes come out as if every change had been accepted.
What the Conversion Does
The tool reads the document with the mammoth library, which pulls the text out of the .docx file. It then writes a UTF-8 text file with a blank line after every paragraph. A manual line break (Shift+Enter) or a page break inside a paragraph becomes a line break in the text. Nothing else is added, trimmed or cleaned up.
To see what that means in practice, we built test documents for the elements people ask about, converted them with the live tool in a headless Chrome browser, and read the exact output. The test files were written directly in Word’s file markup and open correctly in LibreOffice, so they are controlled examples rather than real-world documents.
What Survives and What Does Not
| In the Word file | In the text file |
|---|---|
| Title and headings | Kept as plain lines. Heading levels are not marked. |
| Bold, italic, underline | The words are kept. The styling is gone. |
| A hyperlink | The link text is kept. The web address is lost. |
| Bulleted and numbered lists | Each item becomes its own paragraph. The bullets and numbers are gone. |
| A 3×3 table | Every cell becomes its own paragraph, with a blank line between. There are no tabs, and nothing marks where a row ends. |
| Footnotes and endnotes | Both the note text and the reference marks are dropped. |
| Header and footer | Dropped. |
| Text boxes and shapes with text | Kept once, after the paragraph they are anchored to. |
| Images | Dropped, and the alt text with them. The image leaves an empty paragraph. |
| Caption numbers (“Figure 1”) | Kept when Word wrote the number as a normal field, which is what it usually does. Lost in the simpler field form we also tested. |
| Tracked changes | Insertions are kept and deletions are left out, so the text reads as if every change had been accepted. |
| Comments | Not included. |
| Accents, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, emoji, curly quotes | Exact. Non-breaking spaces and tabs are kept too. |
The result that matters most is the quietest one. A reviewed document converts into a clean-looking text that includes every proposed insertion and none of the deletions, with no hint that anything was pending.
Tracked Changes Come Out as Accepted
In our test, a sentence with one insertion and one deleted word came out as the final version, and the comment attached to it vanished. That is convenient if you want a clean copy of the text, and risky if you assume the text file shows what the other side agreed to. If the changes are still under review, accept or reject them in Word first, or compare the two versions before you convert. Our post on why Track Changes is not a diff explains what Word’s markup does and does not show.
How It Compares With LibreOffice
For the same test documents we also ran LibreOffice 7’s plain-text export. The words are the same. The structure around them is not.
| Element | ClearConvert | LibreOffice 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Between paragraphs | One blank line | A single line break |
| List markers | Dropped | Kept (bullets and numbers) |
| Table cells | Each on its own line | Rows kept, cells separated by tabs |
| Footnotes | Dropped | Reference marks kept, note text dropped |
| Header and footer | Dropped | Dropped |
| Text box text | Kept | Dropped |
| Tracked changes | Insertions only | Both the deleted and the inserted text |
Neither output is the “right” one. LibreOffice keeps more of the layout of lists and tables. ClearConvert gives a cleaner read of the final text, but throws away more structure. If you need a table to stay a table, LibreOffice’s export, or a copy of the table pasted into a spreadsheet, is the better route.
Files It Cannot Open
- Old .doc files are rejected as an unsupported file type. Only .docx works. Save the file as .docx in Word first.
- Password-protected, corrupt or renamed files show the message “This file could not be read. It may be corrupt, password-protected, or not a real .docx file.” Nothing is downloaded.
- A document with no text, such as one that contains only an image, stops with “No text found in this DOCX file.”
Size was not a problem in our test. A 100-page document of about 54,000 words converted in roughly 0.2 seconds on the test machine, and the output contained every paragraph in order. Treat the timing as a rough guide, since it came from one machine and a generated file.
Why Keeping the File on Your Device Matters
Many online converters upload the document to a server first. For a menu or a flyer that does not matter. For a contract, a CV or a medical letter it can, as we explain in what happens to a file after you upload it and whether online text tools store your data.
ClearConvert does the conversion in the browser. We logged the browser’s network traffic across 19 test conversions: no request contained document text or file names, and the largest request body was 884 bytes. The page does load its libraries from public CDNs, and Google Analytics and Cloudflare Web Analytics count page views, but none of them receives the document. You can repeat the check: open the developer tools, go to the Network tab, convert a file and look at what is sent.
How to Do It
- Open ClearConvert and load your .docx file.
- Choose TXT as the output format and convert.
- Download the .txt file. It is UTF-8 with LF line endings, named after the original file.
- Check the result for what the table above says is lost: tables, lists, footnotes, and any tracked changes.
If the text file needs further cleaning, our guide to removing line breaks from copied text shows how to rejoin lines without merging paragraphs. For other formats, see converting a PDF to plain text and converting DOCX to PDF without Word.
The honest summary: ClearConvert gives you the words of a Word document as plain text, in order, without the file leaving your device, and it removes almost everything that is not a word. That is exactly right for a clean copy of the text and wrong for anything that depends on tables, lists or pending changes.
For questions or inquiries contact us at info@cleartexteditor.com