Open a Word file (DOCX)
Drop a .docx (an .odt works too) and read the document in your browser, with headings, lists and tables. Copy the text or save it as .txt. The file stays on your device.
or click to pick one, a LibreOffice .odt works too. The file stays on your device and is never uploaded anywhere
🔒 The document is opened by the browser on your own device and is never sent to a server.
How to read a Word document without Office
Drop the .docx file into the box (or click to pick one) and the document appears right below, with headings, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, bold, italic, underline and links. The «How to show it» menu switches to the plain text version, the one you need when the content has to be pasted into an email or a message. The copy button puts the whole text on the clipboard, the download button saves it as a .txt file. An .odt written in LibreOffice or exported from Google Docs works too.
What is actually inside a .docx file
A .docx is not a mysterious format: it is a ZIP archive holding XML files. The text lives in word/document.xml, heading styles in word/styles.xml, list rules in word/numbering.xml and link targets in word/_rels/document.xml.rels. This page opens the ZIP by hand (file index at the end of the archive, then deflate decompression done by the browser) and reads those XML parts, rebuilding heading levels, list numbering (including letter and roman formats) and table structure. An .odt works the same way, with content.xml in place of document.xml.
What you see and what stays out
The goal is reading and recovering the content, not reproducing the page layout. Images stay out (they are counted and reported, not shown), and so do headers, footers, footnotes, comments, fonts, colours, margins and page breaks. If tracked changes are on, you see the text as if every change had been accepted, so without the deleted parts. Bold and italic coming from a custom style rather than from direct formatting may not show up, and a table nested inside another table is flattened into text rows. On huge documents reading stops at the first 4,000 blocks, and the page tells you when that happens.
The file never leaves your device
Everything happens in the browser: no upload, no server, no copy sitting somewhere. That is the difference that matters when the document is a contract, a medical record or an expert report. You can even go offline before opening the file and the page keeps working.
If the document will not open
There are three usual cases. The file ends in .doc (Word up to 2003), a different binary format that has to be saved as .docx first. The document has an opening password, so its content is encrypted and nobody can read it without that password. Or the file got damaged while downloading, in which case it is worth fetching it again from the email or the original site. In each of these cases the page says so instead of staying blank.