Guide
How to open a DOCX file without Word
Open a .docx without Word or an upload. Filelathe reads the Word package in your browser — text and embedded images, free, no signup.
Open the file in the browser
You do not need Word, LibreOffice, or an account. Open Filelathe and use Choose file, or drop the document on a desktop. A .docx is a ZIP package: Filelathe reads word/document.xml in the tab and shows the prose in the document viewer. Images under word/media are appended after the text when they are a common image type, up to 8 images and 600KB each.
On a Chromebook, Mac, or iPad the same site works. Choose file uses the system picker. Nothing is installed.
What you see, and what you do not
This is a reading view. Styles, headers, footers, comments, and tracked changes are not laid out, and long documents are cut off around the first 20,000 characters. It does not edit the file or export a PDF.
A pre-2007 .doc is a different container: an OLE file, text recovered from the WordDocument stream, no image gallery. An .odt is read from content.xml. A .docx sitting inside a ZIP can be opened from the .zip listing, or on its own.
Does the file get uploaded?
Parsing stays in the tab. Filelathe does not send the document to a conversion site. Choosing the tool window may send the filename, the type, and samples to the API. For the general rule, see what stays local.