ODT to Word
Convert OpenDocument .odt to Word .docx.
Click to upload or drag & drop
Select a OpenDocument Text (.odt)
How to use the ODT to Word
- 1Choose your .odt document
Pick the OpenDocument Text file from your device, or drop it straight onto the panel above.
- 2Run the export
Hit Convert to Word. LibreOffice loads the document natively and writes it back out through its Office Open XML filter.
- 3Collect the .docx
The Word file downloads on its own once the export completes.
Examples
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
Named paragraph styles | Word styles of the same name |
Several ODF page styles | Word sections with their own setup |
MathML formula object | Editable OMML equation |
Tracked changes and comments | Word revisions, authors intact |
Bibliography fields | Usually flattened to static text |
Fonts embedded in the .odt | Not carried into the .docx |
Convert ODT to Word
OpenDocument Text is what LibreOffice Writer, OpenOffice and a long list of open-source editors save by default. It is a perfectly good format, and it is also the one that makes a colleague reply asking what to do with the attachment. Turning it into .docx costs you very little, because these two formats are closer cousins than most conversions on this site: both are ZIP archives of XML, both describe a document through named styles, and both were designed in the same decade to solve the same problem.
Two ZIP archives that disagree about the details
Unpack an .odt and you get content.xml for the text, styles.xml for the formatting definitions, meta.xml for the document properties, and a manifest under META-INF listing everything inside. Unpack a .docx and the same information is spread over word/document.xml, word/styles.xml, a docProps folder and a content-types map at the root. The vocabulary is different, the nesting is different, and a handful of concepts exist on one side with no direct counterpart on the other. That handful is the entire story of this conversion — the rest is mechanical.
Where fidelity is actually lost
- Page structure. ODF page styles and Word sections express the same idea in incompatible ways, so multi-orientation documents need a check.
- Bibliographies. Word manages citations through its own source list, which ODF entries cannot populate, so a generated bibliography tends to arrive as ordinary text rather than a live field.
- Embedded fonts. Writer can pack font files into the .odt so the document looks identical on any machine. That embedding is not reproduced in the export, so the .docx falls back to whatever the reader has installed.
- Frames and anchoring.A text frame anchored to a paragraph in Writer becomes a Word floating object, and Word's rules for how text wraps around one are its own. Expect a few millimetres of drift on complex layouts.
What to check once the .docx opens
Three things are worth thirty seconds of your attention before you send the file on: the page count, in case a section break landed somewhere unhelpful; the table of contents, which Word will want to refresh with F9; and any page that mixes an image with wrapped text. Everything else — plain paragraphs, lists, tables, hyperlinks, footnotes — reliably looks the way it did in Writer.
The server step, and why there is one
A browser can unzip an .odt, but unzipping is the easy part. Producing a .docx that Word opens without complaint means resolving the entire style inheritance chain, rebuilding list numbering, rewriting every field and deciding where each section boundary belongs. That logic lives in LibreOffice's export filter, and the practical way to use it is to run LibreOffice. Your file is sent over an encrypted connection to a headless copy of it here, given a scratch folder used by nothing else, and that folder is destroyed the moment the finished Word file has been handed back.
If Word is not really the requirement
Plenty of people convert to .docx when what they actually need is a file the recipient cannot accidentally reflow. If the document is finished, ODT to PDFgives you fixed pages and no compatibility conversation at all. If you are going the other way — a Word file that needs to open natively in Writer — use Word to ODT. For the spreadsheet and presentation equivalents, see ODS to XLSX and ODP to PowerPoint.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do my paragraph styles survive?
They do, and this is the strongest part of the conversion. Both formats build a document out of named styles that are defined once and referenced everywhere, so a Heading 2 in Writer becomes a Heading 2 in Word and the outline pane on the other end fills in correctly. What differs is the bookkeeping underneath: OpenDocument keeps ad-hoc formatting in a separate pool of automatic styles, and those are merged into direct formatting on the Word side, which is why the style list can look tidier than the document.
Why did my headers and footers change on some pages?
This is the single most common surprise, and it comes from a real structural difference. OpenDocument attaches page geometry to a page style, so a document can switch from portrait to landscape simply by switching style mid-flow. Word has no page styles at all — it divides a document into sections, each carrying its own margins, orientation and header/footer set. Mapping one model onto the other works, but a document with several page styles can end up with section breaks in slightly different places than you expect.
What about tracked changes, comments and footnotes?
Revision marks and comments generally arrive intact and stay editable in Word, including the author names and timestamps. Footnotes and endnotes keep their text and their numbering. The formatting of the separator line and the footnote area itself is defined differently by the two formats, so that part is approximated rather than copied.
Are equations converted or turned into pictures?
They are converted. Writer stores a formula as a MathML object; Word uses its own OMML markup, and the export translates between them. Straightforward algebra, fractions and summations come out as live, editable Word equations. Deeply nested matrix or chemistry expressions are where the translation starts to drift, so those are worth a glance.
Can I send the .docx back and reopen it in Writer later?
Yes, though a document does lose a little on every round trip, and the losses are cumulative rather than self-correcting. If a file is going to bounce between LibreOffice and Word repeatedly, it is better to agree on one format for the whole exchange than to convert at each handover.
What does it cost and how big can the file be?
Nothing at all, with no registration and nothing added to the output document. Each .odt you send may be up to 100 MB, which comfortably covers an illustrated manual or a thesis with embedded figures.