Show the Working

DOCM to TXT

Your document never leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make this work. That is worth more here than on most pages: a document is usually the one thing on a computer somebody would mind a stranger reading, and the ordinary way to convert one is to upload it to a company that then has it.

…or drop one anywhere on this page.

The words, with the structure that survives without markup.

Headings stay on their own lines, list bullets are kept, and table cells come out row by row. That is all plain text can hold, and the useful question is what it keeps rather than what it drops: a converter that returns one unbroken block of prose has technically given you the words and practically given you nothing.

A macro-enabled Word document is a ZIP of XML, which is why this needs nothing

Rename a .docm to .zip and open it: inside is the document as XML, its styles, its relationships and its pictures as ordinary files. Your browser can already unzip — that is what DecompressionStream is — and reading XML needs no library. So the whole job happens here, with nothing fetched and nothing uploaded.

A .docm is a .docx with one extra part in it — vbaProject.bin, the macro project. The document itself is identical, which is why this page needed nothing written for it. The macros are never read and never run, and what you download has none.

What a macro-enabled file actually is

A .docm, .xlsm or .pptm is the ordinary file with one extra part inside it: vbaProject.bin, holding a Visual Basic macro project. Everything else — the text, the sheets, the slides — is byte for byte what the plain version holds, which is why this page reads it without doing anything special.

The macros are never read and never run. That is not a limitation to apologise for; it is the reason most people are on this page. A macro is a program, and a program that arrived in a document is the single most common way an office network is attacked. Nothing here opens it, and what you download has no macro project in it at all.

If the file you choose has one, it is said on screen — because “this had macros and they are gone” is worth knowing before you send the result to somebody expecting them to work.

What does not come across, and why

The page layout, deliberately: margins, page size, headers, footers, page numbers, columns and anything positioned on a page. None of that means anything in a document that reflows to fit a phone. Fonts, colours and sizes go the same way — what is kept is what they were expressing: a heading, a quotation, emphasis, a list.

Three things a macro-enabled Word document can hold that do not survive, and you should know before you rely on this: tracked changes, comments and footnotes. A reviewed document converted here comes out as the text with the changes accepted and the discussion gone. If those matter, they have to come out of the original.

It does not open .doc — the pre-2007 Word format, which is not a ZIP at all but a compound binary document, and a different job entirely. Save it as .docx first and it will open here. It does not open .pages, and it will tell you if you hand it a spreadsheet or a presentation rather than failing silently.

Why there is no DOCM to PDF here

Because it is not a conversion, it is typesetting. A PDF fixes text to a page of a particular size with particular margins and particular fonts, and something has to choose all of those and decide where every break falls. Your word processor already does that, with the choices in front of you, and its “export as PDF” is the right tool. A converter that made those decisions silently would have made them for you.

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