No longer able to save WORD file as "TXT" on Mac

Question

No longer able to save WORD file as "TXT" on Mac

Sabine Wilms 0

For the past few weeks, all of a sudden I have noticed that I can no longer save a WORD file as "TXT". This is something I have to do for my work, it has to be a "TXT" file formatted as UTF-8, for reasons too long to explain here, related to Chinese translation issues. Super frustrating. I will follow the usual procedure: Open a file in WORD, click "save as" and select "plain text (txt)" as the option. When I do that, I get a pop-up message that says that I cannot do that with this file. See picture. I have tried everything. Please help.... Using WORD version 16.112.1 on a 2024 Mac, OS Tahoe 26.6.1,

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Answer 1

Stefan Blom 351.1K MVP Volunteer Moderator

This issue has been reported to Microsoft. Being a former Microsoft MVP, I no longer have access to the Office team, but other contributors in Q&A would know more.

Sabine Wilms 0 Reputation points

2026-08-21T20:11:41.24+00:00

Thank you for responding. Do you mean by this that this is a bug that others have also reported and that Microsoft is working on fixing? What is the time line? What am I supposed to do in the meantime? I really need to be able to create TXT versions of my WORD files. Thanks so much for responding.
Stefan Blom 351.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2026-08-21T23:01:06.9466667+00:00

Yes, it is a known bug in the sense that other people have seen it. See for example the thread at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5961923/save-as-in-word-wont-save-as-plain-text .

You can report it as well. Use the feedback portal at https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/fb6d67e3-301c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472.

While waiting for a fix, there are many workarounds. You can copy the document content into a text editor such as TextEdit (on a Mac) and save it in plain text format.
Sabine Wilms 0 Reputation points

2026-08-21T23:07:29.11+00:00

Thank you so much for that. I have never used "TextEdit" so I will give that a try. It is important for my needs that I can save it in the UTF-8 formatting, which is not possible to choose from Pages but used to be possible when saving from WORD... I really hope they fix this soon. I shall report it at the link you gave me.
Stefan Blom 351.1K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2026-08-22T08:03:38.29+00:00

I should add that CotEditor appears to be a popular plain text editor for macOS, maybe more popular than Apple's own TextEdit app.