Use the free Remove Bullet Points from Text below: your data never leaves your browser — all work happens on your device, and nothing is uploaded to any server.
Why bulleted lists need flattening
Bullets are a display choice, not part of the content. A bullet tells the reader “this is one item in a list”, but the moment you want to reuse those items somewhere else, the bullet becomes baggage. Paste a bulleted list into a spreadsheet and each cell starts with a bullet character. Sort the list and the bullets sort with it, hiding the real order. Feed it to a tool that adds its own markers and you get bullets on top of bullets. Strip the bullets first and the plain lines work everywhere.
Bullets also come in many shapes: round dots, squares, stars, triangles, dashes, asterisks and plus signs, each from a different program or platform. Cleaning them by hand means hunting for every variant, and the small ones are easy to miss at a glance. An automatic pass catches them all at once.
How this tool works
Paste your list. The tool checks the start of every line, after any leading spaces, and removes one bullet character plus the space that follows it. It recognises the common bullet glyphs: round bullets, circles, small squares and blocks, stars, triangles and dashes, as well as the plain keyboard characters people use as bullets: hyphen, asterisk and plus. Lines without a bullet pass through unchanged, so mixed text with plain paragraphs between list items keeps its structure.
There is also an option for task lists. Many notes apps write tasks as a dash followed by a checkbox, like “- [ ] buy milk” or “- [x] done”. With the option on, the whole marker, dash plus checkbox, is removed, leaving just the task text. With it off, only the dash is removed and the checkbox stays, which is what you want if you are moving tasks between apps that understand checkboxes.
When to use it
Use it when copying a list from slides, documents, web pages or notes apps into a plain-text context: an email, a spreadsheet column, a form, or another tool. Use it before sorting, numbering or wrapping list items, since all of those operations work on the item text, not on its bullet. Writers use it to flatten outlines into plain lines for restructuring; shoppers use it to turn a bulleted shopping list into one item per line for a list app; students use it to clean copied notes before making flashcards.
It is also useful in reverse workflows: strip bullets, edit and reorder the plain lines freely, then add a fresh consistent bullet style at the end. That round trip is much easier than trying to fix mixed bullet styles in place.
What to watch out for
The tool only strips bullets at the start of a line. A dash in the middle of a sentence, such as “well-known fact”, is never touched, and neither is a bullet used as a separator inside a line. It also strips only one bullet per line: a line with two nested bullets, like “• – item” from a badly converted outline, will need a second pass, which is fine, since running the tool twice is harmless on already-clean lines.
Be careful with lines that begin with a hyphen for a different reason, such as negative numbers or command-line flags in pasted notes. A line like “-5 degrees” is not a bullet list item, but the tool will treat a leading hyphen followed by a space as a bullet, so check lines like that after cleaning. The plain-text result makes such cases easy to spot.
Tips for plain lists
Clean bullets before any other line operation, and keep the original bulleted version until you are happy with the result, since re-adding the exact original bullet style later is extra work. If your list mixes several bullet styles, this tool normalises them all to nothing in one pass, which is the cleanest starting point for any reformatting. As with all tools here, everything runs in your browser and nothing you paste is uploaded.
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