.DOCX File Extension

Document created by Microsoft Word, a common word processing program; contains document text, images, formatting, styles, drawn objects, and other document settings; commonly used to author documents in business and academic settings.

Unlike .DOC files, which store document data in a single binary file, DOCX files are created using the Open XML format, which stores documents as a collection of separate files and folders in a compressed zip package. DOCX files contain XML files and three folders, docProps, Word, and _rels, which hold the document properties, content, and relationships between the files.

DOCX files are designed to make document contents accessible. For example, document text is saved using plain text files and document images are stored as individual image files within the DOCX file.

DOCX files can be opened by Word 2007 or later for Windows, or with Word 2008 or later for Mac OS X. They may also be opened with earlier versions of Word for Mac and Windows via Open XML document support.

NOTE: To explore the contents of a DOCX file manually, rename the ".docx" extension to ".zip" and then decompress the resulting file with any zip decompression utility.