Convert Word to VTT

How to convert Word to VTT

1. Open your .docx file

   Drop a Word document into the box above, or click to browse. It’s unpacked and read by your browser and never uploaded.

2. Choose how the text becomes captions

   Pick “Line” to make each line a caption, or “Paragraph” to keep lines that belong together on screen at once. Then choose reading time, or the same number of seconds for every caption.

3. Download the .vtt file

   Check the captions and their times in the preview, then download. lesson-3.docx becomes lesson-3.vtt.

From a script in Word to captions on the web

Captions for online video usually begin as a document. An instructional designer writes the narration of a course in Word, a marketing team approves a script with Track Changes, a podcast producer pastes an interview transcript into a doc for editing. When the video is published, the platform asks for a caption file, and that file is almost always WebVTT.

WebVTT is plain text: the word WEBVTT on the first line, then one block per caption with a start time, an arrow and an end time, such as 00:00:04.200 --> 00:00:07.900. Browsers, Moodle, Canvas, Kaltura, Vimeo and YouTube all read it. Building one by hand from a long Word file means hundreds of timestamps typed without a mistake.

What this page reads. A .docx is a ZIP archive of XML. The words are in word/document.xml. The page unpacks that one part in your browser and takes the text of each paragraph in order. Styles, comments, headers, footers, pictures and text deleted with Track Changes are left out.

What the tool does with your document

One line of text per paragraph. Paragraphs are read in order, table cells row by row, and a manual line break inside a paragraph starts a new line.

Captions that fit the screen. With “Line” selected, long lines are cut at the end of a sentence, then at a comma, then between words, and wrapped onto at most two rows of 42 characters.

Times at reading pace. Each caption stays about one second per 15 characters, from 1.5 to 7 seconds, with a tenth of a second between captions. “Same for all” gives every caption the number of seconds you type instead.

Timed documents stay timed. A document that holds a pasted .vtt or .srt file opens as captions. Its times are kept, and it is saved as clean WebVTT with the WEBVTT header.

Tips

Remove what isn’t spoken. Slide numbers, scene notes and speaker instructions in the script become captions too. Delete them in Word first, or clean them up afterwards in the Subtitle Editor.

Line the captions up. The captions start at 0:00. If the narration starts later, move the whole file with Shift Subtitle Timing, then check a few lines against the video in the Subtitle Player.

Need SubRip instead? Convert Word to SRT saves a .srt file for desktop players and video editors. Have a .txt file? Convert TXT to VTT takes plain text.