My Microsoft 365 subscription was deactivated some time ago, but I could still copy and paste text from my old Word documents until recently. Now Word appears to block that functionality because the subscription is inactive. I have years of documents stored only in Microsoft's cloud storage, not locally, and I can't reliably download or export them. I currently use Ulysses and want to move the documents there, ideally preserving the text even if I have to deal with formatting separately. What is the best way to retrieve and transfer these files on a Mac without an active Microsoft 365 subscription?
4 Answers
Free office suites such as LibreOffice and OnlyOffice can read Word documents without requiring a Microsoft 365 subscription. If you can get the files downloaded, one of those programs should let you open them, save them in another format, or copy the contents into your writing app.
Since you’re using a Mac, Pages is already available and can open many .docx files. You could use it as an intermediate step: open each document in Pages, then copy the content into Ulysses or export it in a format Ulysses supports.
If you only need the words and not the original layout, exporting or saving each document as plain text is another option. That will remove most formatting, but it can make the content easier to move into Ulysses. Google Docs may also be useful as a conversion step if you can upload the files there.
Try downloading the original .docx files from the cloud storage website instead of copying the text inside Word. Once you have the files locally, you may be able to import them into Ulysses or open and convert them with Pages, LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, or another compatible app.
Unfortunately, the web download process still fails for me without an active subscription. Copy and paste has started working again, though, so I may use that to recover the text and worry about formatting later.