How to Save Word File as Plain Text Without Formatting

You have a Word document with fonts, colors, tables, and images, but you need to strip everything down to raw text. This is common when exporting content to a code editor, pasting into a plain text field, or preparing a file for a system that cannot interpret rich formatting. Word includes a dedicated Plain Text export format that removes all formatting, images, and layout while preserving the text characters and line breaks.

This article explains how to save a Word file as plain text using the Save As dialog. You will learn which settings to choose, what happens to your content during conversion, and how to avoid common pitfalls like lost line breaks or garbled characters.

How the Plain Text Export Works in Word

When you save a Word document as a plain text file, Word discards every formatting element that cannot be represented in a simple text stream. This includes font faces, sizes, colors, bold and italic, underline, tables, images, hyperlinks, headers and footers, page numbers, and any embedded objects. The resulting .txt file contains only the text characters, spaces, tabs, and line breaks.

Word uses the active paragraph marks and manual line breaks to determine where lines end in the text file. If your document has section breaks or column breaks, those are converted to line breaks. Page breaks are ignored because plain text has no concept of pages.

You also control the text encoding during the save process. Encoding determines how characters such as accented letters, symbols, and non-Latin scripts are stored. Choosing the wrong encoding can produce garbled text, so this article covers the safe options.

Steps to Save a Word File as Plain Text

1. Open the document in Word
   Launch Word and open the document you want to convert. Verify the content is final and that you do not need any formatting in the output.
2. Open the Save As dialog
   Click File in the top-left corner, then select Save As. Choose a location such as This PC or OneDrive.
3. Select Plain Text as the file type
   In the Save as type dropdown list, scroll down and choose Plain Text (txt). Do not select Word Document (docx) or any other format.
4. Name the file and choose a location
   Type a name for your text file in the File name field. Navigate to the folder where you want to save it.
5. Click Save to open the File Conversion dialog
   Press the Save button. Word immediately displays the File Conversion dialog box. This dialog controls how the text is encoded and how line breaks are handled.
6. Choose the text encoding type
   In the File Conversion dialog, under Text encoding, select one of these options:

   – Windows (Default): Uses the ANSI code page for your system locale. Best for English and Western European languages.
   – MS-DOS: Uses the OEM code page. Required if the text file will be used in legacy DOS applications.
   – Other encoding: Opens a list of all available code pages. Choose Unicode (UTF-8) if your document contains characters from multiple languages or special symbols. UTF-8 is the safest choice for modern systems.

   Select the radio button next to your preferred encoding.

7. Set line break behavior
   In the same dialog, under End lines with, choose:

   – CR / LF (Windows): Adds a carriage return and line feed at each line break. This is the standard for Windows text files.
   – CR (Mac): Adds only a carriage return. Use this if the file will be opened on older Mac systems.
   – LF (Unix): Adds only a line feed. Use this if the file will be used on Linux or modern macOS systems.

   For most users, CR / LF (Windows) is the correct choice.

8. Allow character substitution if needed
   Check the box Allow character substitution if your document contains characters that cannot be represented in the chosen encoding. When checked, Word replaces unsupported characters with the closest ASCII equivalent. For example, an em dash becomes two hyphens. Leave this unchecked if you want Word to alert you about unsupported characters instead.
9. Click OK to complete the conversion
   Press the OK button. Word creates the .txt file and closes the dialog. The original .docx file remains unchanged.

Common Problems When Saving as Plain Text

Line breaks are missing or text is one long paragraph

If the resulting text file shows no line breaks, the original document likely used manual line breaks (Shift+Enter) instead of paragraph marks (Enter). Word treats manual line breaks as soft breaks and may not convert them to line breaks in the text file. To fix this, open the original document, press Ctrl+H to open Find and Replace, search for ^l (manual line break) and replace with ^p (paragraph mark), then repeat the Save As process.

Special characters or accented letters appear as garbled text

This happens when the encoding selected in the File Conversion dialog does not match the characters in your document. Re-save the file and choose Other encoding then Unicode (UTF-8). UTF-8 supports all characters and symbols used in modern documents. If the file must be opened in an older application that does not support UTF-8, choose the code page that matches the language of the text, such as Western European (Windows) for English or French.

Tables and lists lose their structure

Plain text has no concept of tables, columns, or bullet lists. Word converts table cells into a single line of text separated by tabs. Bullet and numbered lists lose their bullet characters and numbers. To preserve some structure, manually convert tables to tab-separated text in Word before saving. Select the table, go to Layout under Table Tools, click Convert to Text, and choose Tabs as the separator.

Plain Text Export vs Other Methods to Remove Formatting

Item	Save As Plain Text (txt)	Paste Special > Unformatted Text
Output type	New .txt file on disk	Text pasted into another app (no file created)
Formatting removed	All formatting, images, tables, headers, footers	All formatting, images, tables, hyperlinks
Line break control	Choose CR/LF, CR, or LF in File Conversion dialog	Uses the line breaks from the copied text as-is
Encoding control	Choose Windows, MS-DOS, or Unicode (UTF-8)	Uses the destination app’s default encoding
Best use case	Creating a permanent text file for archiving or code	Quickly pasting unformatted text into an email or editor

You can now save any Word document as plain text without formatting. Use the File > Save As > Plain Text (txt) path and choose UTF-8 encoding for the widest character support. If you only need to copy a portion of the document, use Ctrl+Shift+V or Paste Special > Unformatted Text to paste without formatting. For batch conversions, consider using a macro that loops through all .docx files in a folder and saves each as .txt with UTF-8 encoding.