Convert Word 97–2003 (DOC) to Plain Text
Free online converter for Word 97–2003 (DOC) files. Unformatted UTF-8 text. Nothing to install, no watermark, and every file is deleted automatically.
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Upload a Word 97–2003 (DOC) file to convert it to Plain Text. Up to 3 files at once, 100 MB each.
Free · up to 3 files · 100 MB each · files deleted automatically after 1 hour.
About DOC and TXT
Word 97–2003 (DOC) .doc
Word's pre-2007 binary format. Still common in long-lived archives, and still readable, but superseded by DOCX for nearly twenty years.
Good for
- Readable by very old Office installations
- Common throughout older document archives
Trade-offs
- Opaque binary format with a difficult history
- Larger than the equivalent DOCX
- Newer features simply do not exist in it
application/msword
Plain Text .txt
Just characters. No fonts, no sizes, no layout — which is exactly why it will still open, unchanged, in fifty years.
Good for
- Universally readable, now and indefinitely
- Tiny, and works with every text tool ever written
- Nothing hidden — what you see is the whole file
Trade-offs
- No formatting, images or structure whatsoever
- Character encoding must be right or accents break
- Line endings differ between Windows and everything else
text/plain
DOC and TXT side by side
| DOC | TXT | |
|---|---|---|
| Compression | Binary, uncompressed | None |
| Animation | No | No |
| Typically used for | Legacy archives and older Office files | Notes, logs, source data, long-term archives |
What changes when you convert DOC to TXT
Rendered by LibreOffice
The conversion runs through headless LibreOffice — the same engine behind the desktop suite, not a lookalike parser. It handles ordinary documents faithfully. Where it can drift is on the elaborate: a document leaning on fonts the server does not have will have them substituted, and the substitute rarely occupies exactly the same width, so line and page breaks can move. Heavily designed layouts are worth checking against the original.
DOC is the pre-2007 binary format
Microsoft replaced DOC with its XML-based successor in Office 2007, and support has been quietly eroding since — recent versions of Office block these files by default on security grounds, because the old binary format can carry macros in ways that are hard to inspect. Converting is usually the right move for anything you intend to keep. Macros are not carried across.
Comments and tracked changes
Editorial metadata is the first thing to go in a format conversion: comments, tracked changes and revision history rarely have an equivalent in TXT and are generally dropped or flattened into the text. Treat the output as a clean copy of the current state of the document. If the review history matters, keep the DOC alongside it.
Only the words survive
TXT stores characters and nothing else, so fonts, sizes, colours, images, tables and page layout are all dropped. What you get back is the text itself — which is the point when you want the content free of the formatting around it.
Other Word 97–2003 (DOC) conversions
Other ways to get Plain Text
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