Detailed .docx Format Information A .docx file is a replacement format for the traditional Microsoft Word .doc file format. .docx is the default file format in the latest version of Microsoft Word in Office 2007. All docs in the new office family are based upon an open standardized specification called Office Open XML. One .docx file is actually a collection of many files, stored in an archive or (zip-file). For example, if you rename your .docx file to .zip you can use it like any other zip-file. After you do that, you can look inside and see the different files that comprise the .docx file. If you extract to the current folder a number of files and directories appear. In the root level, we have 3 folders "_rels", "docProps" and "Word". In addition with have a file called [Content_Types].xml. The [Content_Types].xml file describes the contents of the zip-package and is used internally to Word as a table of contents for further processing. The rels folder will hold a map of all the relationships within the package. It is a map over all the files in the package and how they relate to each other. Now moving on to the word folder we get to the actual content of the word document. From the folder structure above you can see a number of xml-files. The most important of all xml-files in the entire zip-package is the document.xml Why? Because it is here the main text content as you know it is stored. Using these steps you can manually see the actual text from a docx document. But, it is much easier to convert your documents online.