My Microsoft 365 subscription was deactivated quite a while ago. I used to be able to copy and paste text from my old Word documents, but that no longer works. I'm using a Mac and want to move years of writing into Ulysses, which is now my main writing app. The documents are stored only in Microsoft's cloud, not locally, and I can't seem to download or convert them without an active subscription. What's the best way to retrieve the text and transfer it, even if I have to deal with formatting separately?
3 Answers
Pages is already installed on most Macs and can open .docx files. Open each document in Pages, then save or export it in a format that Ulysses supports. Free alternatives such as LibreOffice and OnlyOffice should work too.
Try downloading the original .docx files from the cloud storage website instead of copying text from the Word app. Once you have the files locally, you can open or convert them with Pages, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, or another free word processor, then import the content into Ulysses.
Unfortunately, the website also seems to block the download when I’m not subscribed. Copy and paste has started working again, though, so I may use that as a fallback and worry about formatting later.
If you can access the documents through the browser, you could also open them with an online editor such as Google Docs and export them as text or .docx files. This is mainly useful if the original files can be downloaded or transferred from the cloud first.
I didn’t realize Pages could open Word documents. I’ll try that, although I may need to copy the text into Ulysses separately since that’s where I do all my writing now.