How to Convert a Word Document to .txt on Mac

Convert · 4 min read · March 2025

Converting a Word document to plain text sounds like it should be a File → Save As job. And it mostly is — but there are a few things that can go wrong with encoding and line endings that are worth knowing before you end up with a broken file.

Method 1 — Word for Mac: Save As Plain Text

If you have Microsoft Word installed, open the .docx file. Go to File → Save As. In the format dropdown, choose Plain Text (.txt). Word will warn you that formatting will be lost. Click OK. A second dialog asks about encoding — choose Unicode (UTF-8) unless you have a specific reason to use something else. Click Save.

Check the resulting file in a text editor. Tables, images, and embedded objects are dropped. Headers and footers are usually dropped too. What remains is just the text content, linearized into paragraphs.

Method 2 — TextEdit (no Word required)

TextEdit can open .docx files. Drag the file onto the TextEdit icon in your Dock, or right-click the file and choose Open With → TextEdit. Once it's open, go to Format → Make Plain Text (⇧⌘T). Confirm that you want to remove formatting. Then File → Save (⌘S) and name the file with a .txt extension.

After saving with TextEdit, always verify the result looks correct before deleting the original. TextEdit sometimes handles complex table layouts and footnotes unpredictably when converting to plain text.

Method 3 — Terminal with textutil (cleanest method)

macOS ships with a command-line tool called textutil that converts between document formats. It's reliable, fast, and handles encoding correctly:

textutil -convert txt ~/Desktop/document.docx

This converts the file and saves a .txt version alongside the original. If you want to specify the output location:

textutil -convert txt -output ~/Desktop/output.txt ~/Desktop/document.docx

To convert an entire folder of Word documents at once:

textutil -convert txt ~/Documents/WordFiles/*.docx

This processes every .docx file in the folder. Each one gets a corresponding .txt file in the same location. textutil is the most reliable method on Mac for batch conversion.

What gets lost in conversion

When you convert from DOCX to plain text, you're intentionally throwing away a lot of data. Here's what disappears:

  • All fonts, colors, bold, italic, underline
  • Tables (content is linearized, structure is lost)
  • Images and embedded objects
  • Headers, footers, and page numbers
  • Comments and tracked changes
  • Footnotes and endnotes (may be appended at the end depending on the tool)

What remains is the raw text content of the document, in the order it appears on the page. For most purposes — archiving, processing with a script, importing into another system — that's exactly what you need.

For a single file, TextEdit or Word's Save As is fine. For bulk conversion or anything going into a script or data pipeline, use textutil in Terminal. It's built into macOS, handles encoding correctly, and processes whole folders in one command.