Extract text from Office
An Office document is an archive of XML files: the text is in there, and reading it needs neither Office nor an online service. Here it is pulled out inside your browser and comes back as a plain text file.
Your file stays on your device: nothing is uploaded
How it works
From Word you get the paragraphs in document order, with tables as columns; from Excel each sheet row by row, with dates in readable form; from PowerPoint the slides in presentation order. What you do not get: page numbers and automatic indexes, text deleted by tracked changes, formatting. Pre-2007 formats — .doc, .xls, .ppt — cannot be read: open them and save them again in the newer format.
Frequently asked questions
- Do images and charts end up in the text?
- No: you get the words written in the document, including those in Word and PowerPoint text boxes, while images and charts are skipped along with anything written inside them. If the document has a scanned page pasted in as a picture, that text needs “Recognise text (OCR)”.
- How do dates and numbers come out of an Excel sheet?
- Dates come out as year-month-day, like 2023-03-15, with the time only where the cell shows it; a time of day comes out as 09:30:00 and a duration in total hours, like 36:00:00. Numbers come out as Excel shows them, with a decimal point and no currency symbol or thousands separator: 25% becomes 0.25. For formulas you get the result, not the formula.
- Do hidden sheets come out too?
- Yes: every sheet in the workbook comes out, in tab order, hidden ones included, each under a line with its name. Cells in a row are separated by tabs. If you need a table to reopen in a spreadsheet, “CSV ⇄ Excel” turns it into a CSV, one sheet at a time.
- If I include notes and comments, where do they go?
- In Word they go after the main text, grouped by kind, each under its own title: “Footnotes”, “Endnotes”, “Comments”, “Header” and “Footer”. A header repeated unchanged across pages comes out once. In PowerPoint the speaker notes appear right under their slide, marked “[Speaker notes]”.
Your files are never uploaded. Anywhere.
Your file stays in your browser’s memory: it is read, processed and written back here. There is no server to send it to.
- Processed locallyEverything happens on your device.
- Nothing to upload, nothing to wait forNothing to upload, no waiting.
- No files to deleteWe keep nothing: nothing reaches us.