ODT to Text
Extract the text from an .odt — the open format LibreOffice writes by default — including headings, lists and table cells, with optional footnotes. A useful companion for anyone who works across Word and LibreOffice. Parsed in your browser, never uploaded.
Markdown output keeps the outline structure, so a level-one heading becomes “# Heading”.
Prefixes each list item with a bullet so the structure survives in plain text.
Each row of a table becomes one line, with its cells separated by tabs.
Footnotes are collected and listed at the end, numbered in document order.
How odt to text works
- Add your documentDrop in an .odt. Furtu checks it is a ZIP container and locates the content.xml part inside.
- Choose the output stylePlain or Markdown headings, bullet markers on list items, table rows, and footnotes.
- Download the textThe extracted document appears in an editable box with a plain-text download.
What you get
Read text out of an OpenDocument file from LibreOffice. Everything happens inside this page: the file is read by your browser, transformed in memory and handed straight back to you as a download. There is no upload queue, no waiting for a server, and nothing left behind when you close the tab.
Supported formats
Furtu accepts .odt files up to 100 MB each — one file at a time.
- Every file is checked against its real file signature, not just its name, so a renamed or corrupt file is rejected with an explanation instead of failing halfway through.
- Files over the limit are refused up front rather than after a long wait.
Limitations, stated up front
- Only text documents are handled. A spreadsheet or presentation saved with an .odt extension is a different content type and will be reported as such.
- Frames, images, embedded objects, comments, tracked changes and fields such as page numbers are not extracted.
- List levels are flattened to a single bullet level, because OpenDocument keeps the real outline in numbering styles that are not part of the text.
- Rows and columns marked as repeated filler are read once rather than repeated to fill the page, which is how OpenDocument stores a run of empty rows.
- Character formatting — bold, italic, colour, font — is discarded, since plain text cannot carry it.
Frequently asked questions
What is an .odt?
The OpenDocument format — a ZIP container with a content.xml part inside, written by LibreOffice, OpenOffice and most other non-Microsoft word processors. Because it is open and documented, extracting it needs no guessing about private binary structures.
Does it keep my heading levels?
You can choose. “Plain paragraphs” gives you clean text with no markup; “Markdown hashes” prefixes each heading with the right number of # characters, which is genuinely useful if you are about to feed the result into something that understands Markdown.
What about the rest of the formatting?
Bold, italic, colours, fonts, margins, page breaks and styles are not carried across. Only the words and the block structure survive, because that is all plain text can hold. Headings, lists, tables and footnotes are treated as structure rather than formatting, which is why they do survive.
Can it open .docx as well?
No — this tool is for .odt only. If you have a Word file, use DOCX to Text, or save the document as .odt from LibreOffice first, which takes one click and keeps the file open rather than proprietary.
Are ODT files uploaded?
No. The document is unpacked and parsed locally. There is no upload step to opt out of, which is the strongest form of privacy guarantee available: there is nothing to opt out of because nothing leaves.