Convert DOCX to ODT

Most conversions out of DOCX end in a PDF, and a PDF is a decision to stop editing. This one is the opposite: ODT is a working format, and what comes out is a file you can open and carry on writing in.

That changes what "a good conversion" means. Nobody cares whether the PDF has the right paragraph styles, because nobody will ever use them. Here they matter — a heading has to still be a heading, a numbered list has to still be a list, and the styles have to be styles rather than manual formatting that happens to look the same.

Two reasons, and they are different from each other. The first is practical: somebody works in LibreOffice Writer and would rather hold a native file than one the program is translating on the fly every time it opens.

The second is policy. OpenDocument is an independently maintained published standard, which is why several governments, public institutions and archives require it for records that must remain readable long after any particular vendor’s product has moved on. If a submission form asks for ODT, that is the reason, and no other format will be accepted in its place.

For ordinary documents — reports, letters, minutes, essays, contracts — essentially all of it. Paragraph and character styles map across, tables keep their structure and borders, images stay where they were placed, headers, footers, footnotes and page numbering carry over, and a table of contents remains a table of contents rather than becoming frozen text.

The engine ships metric-compatible substitutes for Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri, Cambria and the other common Microsoft fonts, meaning the replacements occupy the same space. That is what keeps line breaks and page counts where they were, which is usually the visible test of whether a conversion worked.

The differences cluster in Word’s own extensions rather than in anything standard. Complex floating text boxes and drawing canvases may be repositioned. SmartArt has no OpenDocument equivalent and arrives as a picture. Unusual field codes, some advanced numbering schemes and a few equation constructs can shift.

None of this affects a plain document, and all of it affects a heavily designed one. The rule of thumb: if the file would look strange when opened by a colleague on a different version of Word, it is also the file to check after converting.

Both formats support revision marks and comments, and the mapping between them is good — but good is not the same as guaranteed, and a document in the middle of a review is exactly where a silent loss would be expensive.

So convert, then open the result and check the review pane before you delete anything. A finished document with no outstanding revisions carries no risk here at all; a contract with three rounds of redlines in it deserves two minutes of attention.

Nothing is lost here because there was nothing to lose. The .docx format has no place to put a VBA project: Word refuses to write one into it and offers .docm instead, which is why the macro-enabled files in an organisation all carry that second extension. Whatever a .docx does when it is opened, it does with text, styles and fields, and all three convert.

A .docm is a different format and has its own page. That one does carry a VBA project, and the project does not survive the conversion — LibreOffice has a different scripting system with a different object model, so there is nothing to translate it into. Where the automation is the point of the document, rebuilding it in the target program is the job, and it is a job for a person rather than a converter.

Migrations are the real use case — a department moving to LibreOffice, a records office standardising on open formats, a school with a decade of worksheets. Drop the whole folder: each file converts in turn, keeps its name with the extension swapped, and everything comes back as one ZIP.

Keep the DOCX originals until somebody has actually opened a sample of the results. A migration that discards the source before anyone has checked the output is the one that goes wrong, and it goes wrong quietly.

Office formats need a real office engine, so unlike the image conversions on this site this one runs on a server rather than in your browser. The DOCX travels over an encrypted connection, is converted in an isolated environment with no route out to the internet, and the working files are deleted as soon as the job finishes.

The free limit is 25 megabytes per file. That is ample for text documents and is reached mainly by files with large embedded images, which is worth knowing before dropping a hundred-page illustrated manual on it.