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Supports: DOC
.doc file or click "Upload" — you can also pull it in from Google Drive or Dropbox. Batch is supported, so drop in several DOC files and each one converts on our servers.DOC is the legacy Microsoft Word binary format. From Word 97 through Word 2003, every Word document saved by default as a .doc file — a proprietary, OLE-based Compound File Binary Format (structured storage) that packs text, formatting, and embedded objects into a single binary blob. Word 2007 replaced it as the default with DOCX (Office Open XML), so any .doc file you still have is at least a 2007-era format.
That age is exactly why people convert it. The old binary format is harder for non-Microsoft software to parse reliably, can render inconsistently across modern apps, and is no longer the format most tools expect to receive. Common reasons to convert:
| Property | DOC | DOCX | ODT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full name | Word Binary File Format | Office Open XML (Word) | OpenDocument Text |
| Default in | Word 97–2003 | Word 2007 onward | LibreOffice / OpenOffice |
| Standard | Proprietary (Microsoft) | ECMA-376 / ISO/IEC 29500 (2008) | OASIS / ISO/IEC 26300 (2006) |
| Internal structure | OLE compound binary | Zipped XML | Zipped XML |
| Typical file size | Largest | Smaller than DOC | Comparable to DOCX |
| Damage recovery | Hard (single binary blob) | Easier (separate XML parts) | Easier (separate XML parts) |
| Best for | Compatibility with very old Word | Current Microsoft / Google / Office workflows | Open-source office suites |
Microsoft Word opens DOC natively and still reads the format despite DOCX being the default since Word 2007. Free options also handle it: Google Docs imports DOC files, LibreOffice Writer and Apache OpenOffice open them, and Word for the web reads them in a browser. Because DOC is a proprietary binary format, non-Microsoft apps occasionally render complex layouts slightly differently — converting to PDF or DOCX first avoids that.
Convert it to DOCX unless you specifically need to hand the file to someone running a pre-2007 version of Word. DOCX is the modern Office Open XML standard: it produces smaller files, recovers better from corruption because the document is stored as separate XML parts inside a zip rather than one binary blob, and is what current Word, Google Docs, and LibreOffice all expect. The only reason to stay on DOC is legacy compatibility.
It shouldn't. PDF is designed to lock layout — fonts, spacing, images, and page breaks are embedded so the document looks identical on any device or printer, without Word installed. In our testing, a multi-page DOC with embedded images and tables converted to a PDF that matched the original page-for-page. If anything shifts, it is usually because the original DOC referenced a font the system doesn't have; the converter substitutes a close match.
ODT is the native OpenDocument text format for LibreOffice and OpenOffice, so it is the cleanest target if you're moving off Microsoft Office. That said, both LibreOffice and OpenOffice open DOC files directly, so you don't strictly need to convert first — opening the DOC and choosing "Save As → ODT" inside the app works too. Converting to DOCX is the more universally compatible choice if the file may also need to open in Microsoft Word later.
DOC itself doesn't compress text, so the words and formatting are preserved exactly. Converting to DOCX or ODT is also lossless for the document content — only the container changes. Converting to PDF embeds the layout faithfully; the one place size and quality trade off is image-heavy documents, where the Compression Type ("Screen" vs "Printer/Prepress") controls how much the embedded images are downsampled. Rendering pages to JPG or PNG is the only conversion that rasterizes text into pixels.
Yes. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — they are never shared, made public, or used for anything but your conversion. There's no sign-up and no watermark on the output. If you only need a word count rather than a conversion, the in-browser Word Counter processes text without any upload at all.