Convert Word
to Rich Text Format

Converting from Word

Not sure if the world would be a better place without Microsoft Word, but I guess we’ll never find out. It’s here and it’s here to stay. Every fricking office computer has Word on it. Techies hate it, because it’s not really machine-readable, it’s proprietary and there is no documented standard. Office people love it though. There are not limits. Put text in it, fine. Add images, no problem. Want to switch the font to Comic Sans? Sure! Make a creative layout, amazing! Do whatever you like. But don’t forget to convert it to a proper file format before you send it to a techie.

The files end with .docx by default.

More about Word files

Converting to Rich Text Format

The Rich Text Format originated in the Microsoft Word Development team in 1987. It was developed for cross-platform document interchange with other products from Microsoft. You could say it’s the light version of Word files. Still proprietary, but less feature rich. It has more features than a plain text file, that’s why it has rich in the name though. There hasn’t been a change since 2008 (Version 1.9.1). It’s not dead though. Every once in a while there comes a small file with a .rtf extension. When you see such a file, you know it’s a Rich Text Format file. One cool thing: RTF files are human-readable. It’s not some binary file, it’s a plain text based markup format.

The files end with .rtf by default. More about Rich Text Format files