FineDocs
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Get the text out of a Word file

Extract the text from a .docx free, as plain text or as Markdown with headings kept. No Word licence, no account, and no upload of your document.

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Markdown keeps headings and bullet lists. Plain text keeps only the words and the line breaks.

Results appear here. Nothing is uploaded.

    How it works

    A .docx is a ZIP archive, so its central directory is read to find word/document.xml and that one member is inflated with the browser's own deflate implementation — no library is involved. The XML is then walked for the four elements that carry visible content: w:p for paragraphs, w:t for runs of text, w:tab and w:br for the whitespace Word stores as elements rather than characters. Headings come from the pStyle name, which is the only place the level is recorded.

    What to watch out for

    The old .doc format cannot be read at all

    Anything saved before 2007, or saved deliberately as .doc since, is a compound binary file rather than a ZIP of XML. There is nothing to unzip and no XML to parse. Opening it in Word or LibreOffice and saving as .docx is the only route, and the tool says so rather than reporting a damaged file.

    Tables come out as lines, not as tables

    A table is recorded as rows of cells containing paragraphs, and each of those paragraphs becomes its own line here. The words are all present and in order; the grid is not. Markdown table syntax would need column counts to be consistent across every row, which real documents rarely are.

    Images, footnotes and comments are left behind

    They live in separate parts of the archive — media files, footnotes.xml, comments.xml — and none of them are read. What you get is the body text of the document as it appears in the main flow, which is what people want when they ask for the text and worth stating plainly when they do not.

    Limits

    Files up to about 50 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.

    Why this works without anything installed

    A Word file is not a mysterious binary. Rename a .docx to .zip, open it, and you will find a folder of XML — the document body in word/document.xml, the styles beside it, images in a media folder.

    Everything needed to read one is therefore already in your browser: an inflate implementation for the archive, and string handling for the XML. That is the entire dependency list, which is why this page loads in a moment and works offline once you have visited it.

    Plain text or Markdown

    The difference is how much structure survives.

    Plain text gives you the words with the paragraph breaks Word recorded. Nothing else: no headings, no bullets, no emphasis. It is what you want for counting words, feeding text into something else, or reading a document without opening Word.

    Markdown keeps the two pieces of structure that translate cleanly. A paragraph styled Heading 1 becomes #, Heading 2 becomes ##, and so on down. A paragraph that Word marked as a list item becomes a - bullet. That is enough to paste into a notes application, a wiki or a static site and have it look roughly right.

    Bold and italic are deliberately not converted. They are recorded per run of characters rather than per paragraph, and stitching runs back together with markers around them produces a mess on any document that has been edited more than lightly.

    What headings actually are in a Word file

    This is worth knowing, because it explains when the Markdown output disappoints.

    Word does not record “this is a heading” as a property of the text. It records a style name — Heading1, Heading2 — attached to the paragraph. If someone made their headings by selecting text and clicking the bold button and making the font bigger, the file contains no heading information at all, and no tool can recover what was never written down.

    Documents produced from templates, or by anyone using the styles panel, convert beautifully. Documents formatted by hand come out as flat text, and that is a property of the source rather than of this tool.

    Nothing is uploaded

    The archive is opened and the XML parsed inside a Web Worker in your browser. Theses, contracts, reports and minutes are exactly what gets converted, and none of them need to be sent anywhere to have their words read out. The file on your disk is never modified — you get a new one.

    Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-02.