Sometimes the formatting is the problem. Upload your .docx or .doc above and get back a plain .txt file containing the words and nothing else — no fonts, no styles, no hidden markup, no tracked changes.
Below: the several things a Word file carries besides your text, why stripping them is a genuine privacy step rather than a downgrade, and the one setting to get right so accented characters survive.
A .docx is a ZIP archive containing a folder of XML files. Rename a copy to .zip and open it — alongside word/document.xml holding your text you will find a good deal more.
Some of it is routine: styles, fonts, layout, images. Some of it is information you may not intend to send:
Converting to plain text discards all of it. A .txt file has no capacity to store any of it — it is a sequence of characters and nothing more. For sending a draft to someone you would rather not hand your revision history to, that is a real and often overlooked benefit.
A .txt file contains no record of which character encoding it uses. Software opening one has to guess, and when it guesses wrong you get strings like é where an accent should be.
Your extracted text should be saved as UTF-8, which covers every language. Most modern editors detect it correctly. Older versions of Windows Notepad sometimes do not — if French, Arabic, Chinese or Cyrillic text looks corrupted, open the file in a different editor and explicitly choose UTF-8 rather than assuming the extraction failed.
One quiet source of trouble worth knowing about: Word's autocorrect converts straight quotation marks into curly ones and hyphens into dashes as you type. Those are non-ASCII characters, and they are the first things to break when an encoding is misread — and the first to cause problems if you paste the text into code or a system expecting plain ASCII. If that is your destination, find and replace them after conversion.
Plain text supports no bold, no italics, no headings, no fonts, no colours, no images, no tables. That is the definition of the format rather than a limitation of the conversion.
Three losses are worth planning around.
Structure becomes invisible. A Heading 1 and a body paragraph look identical in plain text. If the outline matters, add markers before converting — a line of equals signs, or Markdown-style hashes — so the hierarchy survives as something a human or a script can still read.
Tables collapse. Cells become runs of text separated by tabs or spaces, and column alignment disappears the moment the font changes. If the data matters more than the prose, export it as CSV from a spreadsheet instead.
Footnotes lose their anchors. The markers and the notes may end up separated, or the notes gathered at the end with nothing connecting them to the text. Worth checking on academic documents.
Stripping a document back is not only a downgrade. Several jobs are easier once the words are separated from the formatting.
Pasting somewhere without dragging Word's styling along. Paste from Word into a CMS, an email client or a form and you carry hundreds of Microsoft-specific style rules that override the destination's own design. Text is the reliable route, and it is why so many people paste through Notepad as a habit.
Comparing two versions. Extract both to text and run them through any diff tool, and every wording change appears immediately — without formatting differences drowning the real edits.
Feeding another system. Scripts, search indexes, translation tools and text-analysis software generally want raw characters, not a document container.
Long-term archiving. Plain text is the most durable format there is. A .txt file written forty years ago still opens today, which cannot be said of most document formats. For notes you want to be able to read indefinitely, it is the safest choice available.
Going the other way, TXT to Word gives plain text a document structure. Word to PDF keeps the layout fixed for sending, and Word to HTML prepares a document for the web. Browse all Word tools.