Manatee

How to convert a Word document to plain text on a Mac

· 6 min read

In Word, choose File, Save As, and set the format to Plain Text (.txt); pick Unicode (UTF-8) when the encoding dialog appears. Without Word, TextEdit can open the .docx and convert it with Format, Make Plain Text, and the built-in Terminal command textutil -convert txt file.docx handles a whole folder at once. Manatee also converts DOCX to TXT and is the practical route when the folder mixes .docx, .doc, and .rtf. Whatever the method, formatting, images, headers, footers, and comments are discarded; only the words remain.

What plain text keeps and what it throws away

A .txt file is nothing but characters and line breaks. That is its whole point and its whole limitation.

Kept:

  • The body text, in reading order.
  • Paragraph breaks.
  • List text, sometimes with the bullet or number rendered as a character, sometimes not.
  • Table contents, usually with tabs between cells and a line break between rows.

Dropped:

  • Fonts, sizes, bold, italic, colors, alignment.
  • Images, charts, shapes, and text boxes (text boxes are a frequent surprise: their contents may vanish or appear out of order).
  • Headers and footers, page numbers.
  • Footnotes and endnotes in some converters; Word appends them, TextEdit does not.
  • Comments, tracked changes, and all document metadata.
  • Hyperlinks: the visible text stays, the address goes.

If tracked changes are present, accept or reject them in Word before converting. Otherwise the plain text may include deleted passages, inserted passages, or both, depending on the tool.

Option 1: Word

Word has the most complete converter, with control over encoding and line endings.

  1. Open the document in Word.
  2. Choose File, then Save As (or Save a Copy).
  3. Set File Format to Plain Text (.txt) and click Save.
  4. A File Conversion dialog appears. Under Text encoding, choose Other encoding and select Unicode (UTF-8). This keeps accented letters, curly quotes, and non-Latin scripts intact.
  5. Leave Insert line breaks unticked unless you specifically want a hard line break at every wrapped line. Ticking it makes the text awkward to paste anywhere else.
  6. If the file is for a Windows program, set End lines with to CR/LF. For a Mac or a web form, LF only is fine.
  7. Click OK.

Word writes the .txt beside the original; the .docx is unchanged.

Option 2: TextEdit or Pages

TextEdit opens .docx files and can strip them to plain text in two steps.

  1. Right-click the .docx, choose Open With, then TextEdit.
  2. Choose Format, then Make Plain Text (Shift-Command-T). TextEdit warns that formatting will be lost; confirm.
  3. Choose File, then Save As (hold Option if you only see Duplicate). The format is now Plain Text. Set Plain Text Encoding to Unicode (UTF-8) and save.

Pages works through export: open the .docx, choose File, then Export To, then Plain Text, and save. Pages offers an encoding choice in the same dialog.

TextEdit drops headers, footers, and footnotes entirely, and flattens tables to tab-separated lines. For a simple document that is fine; for a report with footnotes, use Word.

Option 3: textutil in Terminal, for many files

macOS includes textutil, a command line converter that uses the same engine as TextEdit. It converts a folder of files in one command.

  1. Open Terminal (Applications, Utilities).
  2. Type cd with a trailing space, drag the folder into the window, press Return.
  3. Convert one file:
textutil -convert txt "chapter.docx"
  1. Convert every Word document in the folder, forcing UTF-8:
textutil -convert txt -encoding UTF-8 *.docx
  1. To send the text straight to the screen or another program instead of a file, use -stdout:
textutil -convert txt -stdout "chapter.docx" | wc -w

That last command gives a word count without opening anything, which is a common reason to want plain text in the first place.

Option 4: Manatee, for mixed folders

If the folder holds a mix of .docx, old .doc, .rtf, .odt, and .webarchive files, Manatee accepts all of them as input and converts to TXT in one drop.

  1. Open Manatee and choose Convert.
  2. Drag the files or the folder into the window, or onto the menu bar icon.
  3. Pick TXT as the target.
  4. Each file appears in the job list with progress, and each .txt is written alongside its source. Originals are never modified.

Manatee runs entirely on the Mac, with no upload and no account, which matters when the documents are contracts, drafts, or anything else you would rather not paste into a website. It is free for 24 hours with every feature, then $9 once.

It is a converter, not an editor: it will not clean up the resulting text, remove blank lines, or reformat lists. And it does not convert Pages documents; export those from Pages directly.

Manatee also helps when a .docx will not open at all. Its Repair mode reads damaged Word files and writes a recovered copy, reporting Fixed, Partial, or Not fixable. Converting that recovered copy to plain text is often the fastest way to see how much of the writing survived. Fixing a DOCX that Word says is corrupt walks through it.

Encoding and line endings, briefly

Two settings cause most plain text headaches.

Encoding. Always choose UTF-8. It represents every character in every language and is what the web, macOS, and modern Windows expect. Older encodings turn accented letters into nonsense when the file moves between systems. If you receive a .txt with garbled characters, reopen it in TextEdit with File, then Open, and pick the right encoding in the dialog.

Line endings. macOS and Linux end lines with LF; Windows uses CR/LF. Most modern programs handle either, but a few Windows tools display a Mac file as one long line, and a few Unix tools show stray ^M characters in a Windows file. Word lets you choose; textutil and TextEdit write LF. If a recipient complains, open the .txt in TextEdit, then Save As, and pick the other line ending style under the Line Endings menu if shown, or ask them to open it in a more tolerant editor.

Questions

Why would I want plain text at all? To paste into a form that rejects formatting, to feed a script or a search tool, to get a clean word count, to archive the words without the baggage, or to strip every trace of comments, author names, and revision history before sharing. On that last point, plain text is the most thorough metadata removal there is, because there is nowhere for metadata to live. How to remove the author name and edit history from a Word document covers the less drastic options.

Can I keep bold and headings in some form? Not in .txt. If you want structure without Word, export to RTF (TextEdit, textutil, or Manatee all offer it), or copy from Word and paste into a Markdown editor, which keeps headings and emphasis as readable markers.

The tables came out as a mess. Tables become tab-separated lines, which looks chaotic in a text editor but pastes cleanly into a spreadsheet. Open the .txt in a spreadsheet app if the data matters more than the prose.

Does the same work for .doc and .rtf? Yes, every method above reads those too. How to convert RTF to DOCX on a Mac covers the RTF side, including RTFD packages with images.