Manatee

How to convert a DOCX to RTF on a Mac

· 6 min read

A DOCX is a modern Word document, and RTF is an older, plainer rich-text format that almost every text editor and word processor on any system can open. To convert one to the other on a Mac, hand the DOCX to a converter, choose RTF as the target, and you get a new .rtf file with your text and basic formatting intact. The fastest way is to drag the file onto a converter and pick RTF, but TextEdit can also do it for straightforward documents.

DOCX and RTF, and why you would switch

A DOCX file is a zipped package of XML. Inside it are your words plus a lot of structure: styles, page layout, tracked changes, comments, footnotes, and sometimes embedded objects or macros. It is the current Word format and it is rich, but that richness assumes the reader has software that understands all of it.

RTF, Rich Text Format, is much older and deliberately simple. It stores text with basic formatting (fonts, sizes, bold, italic, color, alignment, simple tables, and images) as readable markup in a single file. The trade for that simplicity is reach: RTF opens cleanly in nearly every editor and word processor ever made, on Mac, Windows, and Linux, without anything special installed. TextEdit opens it, and so do countless simpler editors.

You would convert DOCX to RTF when you want maximum compatibility: sending a document to someone whose software you cannot predict, feeding it into an old or minimal system that chokes on .docx, stripping out macros and revision history to hand over a clean copy, or storing text in a format that will still open in twenty years. RTF is the safe, boring, universally readable choice, which is often exactly what a document needs to be.

Convert DOCX to RTF with Manatee

Manatee reads .docx files and writes an .rtf alongside them, all on your Mac with nothing uploaded.

  1. Open Manatee and choose Convert, or drag the DOCX onto the menu bar icon.
  2. Pick RTF as the target format.
  3. Drop the DOCX into the window, or several files at once. Each shows in the job list with progress.
  4. The new .rtf lands in the same folder as the original, which is left untouched.

Because the work happens locally, a confidential contract or draft never leaves the machine. The result opens in TextEdit, Word, Pages, and just about anything else.

The built-in TextEdit route

macOS can handle this on its own for simple documents, since TextEdit reads DOCX and saves RTF.

  1. Open the DOCX in TextEdit (right-click, Open With, TextEdit).
  2. Choose File, then Duplicate, so you keep the original safe.
  3. Choose File, then Save.
  4. In the format menu at the bottom of the save dialog, choose “Rich Text Format” and save the .rtf.

For a plain document this works well. The honest limit is that TextEdit is not a full word processor, so it quietly drops the things RTF cannot hold anyway (see the next section) and can also simplify complex tables, multi-level lists, and heavy styling as it opens the DOCX. If your document is mostly text with light formatting, TextEdit is perfectly good. If it leans on advanced Word features, a dedicated converter is more predictable.

What RTF keeps and what it leaves behind

This conversion is not about picture or sound quality, so there is no re-encoding and nothing to blur. Both formats store text losslessly. The real trade-off is formatting fidelity: RTF is a smaller box than DOCX, so some things do not fit.

What RTF keeps: your text, fonts and sizes, bold, italic and underline, text color, paragraph alignment and spacing, bulleted and numbered lists, simple tables, and embedded images.

What RTF drops or flattens: tracked changes and comments, which have no RTF equivalent and disappear, so review markup should be resolved before you convert if you need it. Macros are gone, which is usually a feature rather than a loss. Footnotes, endnotes, and very complex tables or text boxes may not survive intact. Named Word styles are typically flattened into direct formatting, so the text looks right but the underlying style names are gone. Fonts fall back to what the reader has installed.

One practical note: RTF stores images as text-encoded data inside the file, so a DOCX heavy with pictures can produce an .rtf that is noticeably larger. That is normal, not a sign of anything wrong.

If you do not need any formatting at all, converting to TXT instead gives you pure plain text. If you need to preserve the exact appearance for printing or signing rather than editing, a PDF is the better target, though it is not editable text the way RTF is.

Questions

Will tracked changes and comments come across?

No. RTF has no way to store Word’s revision markup, so tracked changes and comments are dropped during conversion. If that history matters, keep the DOCX as your master copy, and accept or reject the changes before converting so the final text is what ends up in the RTF.

My RTF file is bigger than the DOCX. Why?

Because RTF embeds images as text-encoded data, while DOCX compresses everything into a zip. A document with several pictures can grow when converted to RTF. The content is identical; only the storage method differs. If size is a concern and you do not need the images inline, that is a reason to consider a different target.

Can Word still open an RTF file?

Yes. Word, Pages, TextEdit, and virtually every other word processor open RTF directly, and can save it back out too. That universal support is the entire reason to convert to RTF in the first place.

Does converting touch my original DOCX?

No. Manatee writes a new .rtf next to the original and never modifies the DOCX. You can convert, open the RTF to check it, and still have the full Word document with all its features intact.