TXT to DOCX

Text files break lines in two ways. Some, like poems, lists and code, have one item per line; choose Each line so every line becomes its own paragraph. Others, like e-mails and text exported from other programs, wrap long paragraphs over several lines and leave an empty line between paragraphs; choose Blank lines separate paragraphs so each block becomes one paragraph and the lines inside it stay together, with a gap after each paragraph.

Calibri, Arial, Times New Roman, Georgia and Courier New cover English and most European languages. For Indian scripts choose Nirmala UI, included with Windows 8 and later, which supports Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam, or Mangal for Hindi and Marathi. The font name is stored in the document; if the reader does not have it, Word substitutes a similar font.

Plain text keeps only the words. Headings and paragraphs are separated by blank lines, bulleted lists start with a bullet and numbered lists with their number, nested lists are indented, and table rows become lines with columns separated by tabs, which paste neatly into a spreadsheet. Pictures, colours and fonts are left out. Choose Windows line endings for Notepad and most Windows programs, and Mac or Linux line endings for code, servers and Unix tools; add a BOM only if an old program shows accented letters wrongly.

Text files come in different encodings. The converter recognises UTF-8 with or without a byte-order mark and UTF-16 files saved by Notepad, and falls back to the Windows Western encoding for older files, so accented letters, the rupee sign and Indian scripts come through correctly. Word to text always produces UTF-8, which every modern program reads.

If a text file came from an e-mail or a website, check whether its lines are wrapped at a fixed width; if so, choose Blank lines separate paragraphs so the paragraphs flow again in Word. Use Courier New for text that relies on spaces for alignment, such as tables made with spaces, code or logs. After converting, open the document in Word to add headings, a table of contents or page numbers, which plain text cannot carry.