Convert DOCX to DOC for free with your Mac
If you need to convert a .docx file to .doc, don’t pay for one of the many conversion sites or utilities out there. Your Mac has the ability to handle the conversion entirely on it’s own already built in and it’s completely free. We’re going to be using the textutil command line tool to get this done:
- Launch the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
- Type the following command:
textutil -convert doc /path/to/filename.docx
For example, I have a docx file located in my Documents folder that I want converted, this would be the syntax:
textutil -convert doc ~/Documents/ImportantReport.docx
The ~ signifies your home directory, and the rest is just the path to your docx file.
As just a general Terminal tip, I would highly recommend using tab completion when entering in long directory strings and complex names, it’ll save you plenty of headaches. Basically you just start typing the name of a file or directory and hit tab to auto-complete the name.
It works fine for extracting text with some layout kept. However, with my testing it strips out all images!
I checked ‘man’, and I saw no separate option for keeping images.
Can this conversion be done while still keeping the images?
“As just a general Terminal tip, I would highly recommend using tab completion when entering in long directory strings and complex names, it’ll save you plenty of headaches.”
For the more gui-minder users, one can drag a file from the desktop or finder window onto the command line, and the file’s full path and file name will be automagically added to the command line. Thus one would type:
“textutil -convert doc ”
and then drag the file to be converted onto the terminal window.
[...] OS X Daily Podobne artykuły:Terminal – zmiana katalogu (cz. I) Terminal jest Makową linią poleceń [...]
Just use open office and save them as .doc.
Look nice tips, I will test, thanks
And use iconv to change encode :p
[...] Office, your Mac already has the ability to convert to .doc from the dreaded .docx format. By using a simple Terminal command, you’re simultaneously sticking it to the man and getting a usable Word [...]
But for the average Mac user, wouldn’t it be easier to open the docx in TextEdit & save as a .doc?
Thanks. Worked fine.
I found that uploading to google docs and then downloading as a doc preserves images and layout, while TextEdit doesn’t.
GENIUS!!!! I am a Mac user and have been struggling w/ Docx. I love Google Documents now and found it because of you. Thanks!!!
brilliant been struggling with this for a while as i am not used to doing this stuff might be worth pointing out for novices like me that the string has to macth the location of the file or copy yours and put the file in the documents folder thanks
Steve’s advice did it for me~ Google Docs is the way to go! who knew?! thanks
I can open the document in Google Docs but when I try to download as a Word file, I am asked to download the dreaded converter software.
Any ideas?
Tried using the terminal got “Invalid output format.”
Tried using google docs got “File too big” (google docs only goes up to 2M)
Tried using opendocs got a file with no text and images all over the place.
I can get the text to at least appear in textEdit and the images are correctly formated in Pages…so a little time cutting and pasting I guess
Oh my god THANK YOU
Pity the option does not preserve any formatting, images, equations or bibliography references… The result for highly formatted documents is even less usable than what you get with Save as… option…