Document tools

Get the text and data out of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files free, with no Office licence and no account. Everything is read inside your own browser.

Office documents look opaque and are not. A .docx, .xlsx or .pptx is a ZIP archive holding XML files, and everything you would want to read out of one — the paragraphs, the headings, the cell values — is written there in plain text before it is compressed.

That is why these tools need nothing installed and nothing uploaded. Browsers have carried an inflate implementation for years, so opening the archive and reading the XML inside it is something the page can simply do.

What that makes possible, and what it does not

Reading is straightforward. The structure Word records is real: a paragraph is a paragraph, a heading knows it is a heading, a list item knows its level. Text extracted from a .docx therefore comes out with its shape intact, which is a sharp contrast with a PDF, where the same job means guessing from coordinates.

Writing is a different matter. Producing a document that Word will open without complaint means getting a dozen interlocking parts right — content types, relationships, styles, numbering definitions — and a file that is almost correct is a file that will not open at all. Converting into Office formats is therefore not something this site claims to do.

The other honest limit is the older binary formats. A .doc, .xls or .ppt from before 2007 is not a ZIP of anything; it is a compound binary file with a completely different structure. Opening one in Office and saving it again as the modern format is the only practical route.

Once the words are out

Text that has been extracted usually gets compared with something. A clause that changed, a configuration that stopped working, two copies of the same document that differ somewhere: the comparison tool here takes two texts and reports which lines moved, which is the natural next step after reading one out of a file.

Nothing leaves your machine

The same rule as everywhere else here. The archive is opened, the XML is parsed and the text is assembled inside a Web Worker in your browser. Reports, dissertations, minutes and contracts are what these tools get used on, and none of them need to visit a server to have their words read out.