How to open and edit a .docx file on a Mac without Word

You don’t need Word to open or edit a .docx file on a Mac. macOS can preview these files and open them in apps you already have, and free apps and web services can edit them. This guide goes through each way with exact steps, says what each one can’t do, and ends with what our app Quill adds.

In the Finder, with Quick Look

Quick Look shows a fast, full-size preview of nearly any kind of file without opening the file. It works on items in Finder windows, on the desktop, in emails and messages, and other places, and it suits the times you only want to read a document.

In the Finder, select the file, then press the Space bar. A Quick Look window opens.
To open the file in an app from the preview, click “Open with [App]”.
Press the Space bar again or click the close button to close the Quick Look window.

The Quick Look window offers rotating, Markup and the trimming of audio or video. Apple lists no way to change the contents of a document.

Apple’s Quick Look page for users does not name .docx specifically. The statement that Quick Look can generate previews for iWork and Microsoft Office documents comes from Apple’s developer documentation, which says nothing about how faithful the preview is.

In TextEdit, already on your Mac

TextEdit is the word processor that comes with macOS. You can open documents in Microsoft Word, OpenDocument, Web Archive, HTML, rich text and plain text formats, save a document in those same formats, and export it as a PDF.

In the TextEdit app on your Mac, choose File > Open.
Select the document, then click Open.
To save in Word format: choose File > Save, choose a format in the File Format pop-up menu, then click Save.

Apple’s TextEdit pages do not say which Word features, such as styles, tracked changes or headers, TextEdit keeps or drops.

If you want to edit documents with additional features beyond what’s possible with TextEdit, Apple’s advice is to see the Pages User Guide for Mac.

In Pages, on a converted copy

Pages opens Microsoft Word documents, files with a .doc or .docx filename extension, and you can then save them as Pages or Word documents, or in PDF or EPUB formats. Opening a Word file in Pages converts it, and the original file remains intact after you convert it. If you don’t have Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on your Mac, you can get them from the App Store.

Drag the Word document to the Pages icon in the Dock or Applications folder (double-clicking the file opens Word if you have that app). Or, in the Finder, Control-click the file, choose Open With, then choose Pages. Or in Pages choose File > Open, select the file, then click Open.
Edit the document in Pages.
To get a Word file back, choose File > Export To > Word (File > Export To > [file format], from the File menu at the top of your screen).
Click Save, type a name, choose a location in the Where pop-up menu, then click Export.

Pages edits a converted copy: the .docx is converted when opened, and a Word file comes back only by exporting a copy, so any changes you make to the exported document don’t affect the original. Apple warns that when the file opens, you might get a message that fonts are missing or that the file will look different in other ways, and smart annotations won’t appear in exported Word documents.

Pages exports to Microsoft Word: Office Open XML (DOCX). For the legacy DOC format, Apple says to export to the current XML format and then use the Office app. Apple’s conversion article, published January 28, 2026, gives another route: with the file open, click the Share button in the toolbar, click Export and Send, then choose Word.

In Google Docs, in the browser

When you upload Office files to Google Drive, you can edit, comment and collaborate directly on them in Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. All changes are auto-saved to the file in its original Office format.

On your computer, go to drive.google.com.
At the top left, click New, then File Upload, and choose the file. (You can also drag the file into a Google Drive folder.)
In Google Drive, double-click the Office file. It opens in Google Docs.
Edit the file. Changes are saved to the file in its original Office format.

The file has to be uploaded to Google Drive first, and the editing happens in Google’s web apps, not on your Mac. Converting is a separate, optional step: if you want to use Add-ons, Apps Scripts, protected ranges or translate options, you can convert the Office file to Google Docs, and when you convert, you make a copy of your Office file.

Google lists some limits when editing Office files: macros are not supported; embedded charts and videos in Word and PowerPoint files are converted to images; and SmartArt images are converted to Google Drawings. Password-protected Office files can be opened in Edit mode only for .docx, .pptx and .xlsx, and choosing Edit removes the password from the file for all users.

In LibreOffice Writer

LibreOffice is free and open source software; its site says it provides unfettered access to the tools at no cost. Its stated requirements for a Mac are macOS 11 or newer and an Intel or Apple silicon processor, and the help pages quoted here are labelled LibreOffice 26.8 Help.

Install LibreOffice from libreoffice.org.
Choose File - Open, then select the Microsoft Office file in the LibreOffice file open dialog. It opens in LibreOffice Writer.
To keep the Microsoft format when saving, choose File - Save As and, in the File type box, select a Microsoft Office file format.

LibreOffice can open and save documents in the Microsoft Office file formats, including Microsoft Office Open XML formats, and the most recent versions can load and save the formats with the extensions docx, xlsx and pptx.

LibreOffice’s own help says some layout features and formatting attributes in more complex Microsoft Office documents are handled differently or are unsupported, so converted files require some degree of manual reformatting. For Word files it lists features that may cause conversion challenges: AutoShapes, revision marks, OLE objects, certain controls and Microsoft Office form fields, indexes, tables, frames and multi-column formatting, hyperlinks and bookmarks, Microsoft WordArt graphics, and animated characters and text. With a few exceptions, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice cannot run the same macro code.

With Quill

Quill is a word processor for the Mac that looks and works like the one people already know, with tabs, groups, shortcuts and menus where someone who knows Word for Mac expects them; its ribbon has Home, Insert, Layout, Review and View tabs. The .docx format is native to it: Quill reads and writes .docx with its own reader and writer, rather than converting to another format, and it wrote its own because the system’s loses styles, lists, page setup and exact colours. Files in .rtf and .txt open and save too, PDF is an export, fonts your Mac doesn’t have are shown in a stand-in with their names written back unchanged, and every command is also open to an agent on the same Mac, such as Claude Code, over HTTP and MCP.

A .docx round trip through Quill keeps text, paragraph styles by name, character formatting (font, size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript and subscript, colour, highlight), alignment, line spacing, space before and after, indents, paragraph shading, bulleted and numbered lists with their levels, tables (cell text and formatting, column widths, cell fills, merged cells), in-line pictures, links, page breaks, paper size, orientation, margins, and a page number in the header or footer. Not kept: headers and footers other than a plain page number; footnotes, endnotes, comments and tracked changes, where insertions are kept as text and deletions dropped; text boxes, shapes, charts and equations, with floating pictures read as in-line ones; section-by-section page setup, columns and tab stops, with the last section’s page setup used for the whole document; custom styles, whose look is kept as direct formatting while the paragraph becomes Normal unless its style is one Quill has; and table borders other than a plain grid, nested tables, row heights, and numbering formats other than 1. a. i. and bullets, where a list always starts at 1.

Quill costs $19 once, in US dollars, tax included, and it is free for 7 days with no card. One licence covers up to 3 of your Macs, every future update is included, and refunds are available within 30 days; there is no subscription and no account. Quill needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later, and once the trial has ended, documents still open and can be edited, but saving, exporting and printing ask for a licence.

Try Quill free for 7 days.

Then $19 once, for up to 3 of your Macs. No subscription and no account.

Download Quill Buy · $19 About Quill

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later.

Sources

Checked on 13 November 2026.