Word to Markdown Converter

Why this is harder than it should be

Markdown is plain text. A .docx is a zip archive full of XML describing not only what your document says but how Word drew it: style definitions, numbering rules, theme colours, revision metadata. Converting between them means keeping the first part and discarding the second, and most of the difficulty is deciding which is which.

The usual answers are both awkward. Pandoc is excellent and requires installing a command line tool. The web converters are one upload box and a server you know nothing about, which is a real problem when the document is a client contract or an article nobody has seen yet.

What this does

Drop in a .docx and you get Markdown you can copy or download as a .md file. Headings stay headings, lists stay lists and keep their nesting, tables become pipe tables, and bold, italic, strikethrough and links all survive.

The output targets CommonMark plus GitHub-flavoured tables, which is what GitHub, Obsidian, Notion, VS Code, Jekyll, Hugo and Astro all read. Where Markdown allows two spellings of the same thing, the more portable one wins: - for bullets rather than *, which collides with emphasis, and # headings rather than the underlined kind, which breaks the moment it is indented.

It runs entirely in the page. The file is read by your browser and converted there, so nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and the tool works offline once the page has loaded.

About those backslashes

You will sometimes see a backslash in the output where there was none in Word. That is deliberate, and it is the difference between a converter that is careful and one that quietly changes your document.

Markdown has no tags, so a character that happens to be syntax issyntax. A paragraph you wrote as “1. Introduction” would become the first item of a numbered list. A filename like report_v2_final would turn the two underscores into an italic run and eat them. A line starting with a hyphen would become a bullet. Escaping those characters is what stops the conversion rewriting your text, and the backslashes disappear the moment the Markdown is rendered.

What it will not do

Images are the real limit. Word keeps images inside the .docx; Markdown is a text file with nowhere to put them. They come out as image references to inline data, which some editors show and others do not. If the images matter, pull them out of Word separately, or do not convert to Markdown at all and read the next section.

Word-only features have no Markdown equivalent. Comments, tracked changes, footnotes, text boxes, SmartArt, columns and page headers are not things Markdown can express, so they are dropped rather than approximated badly.

If the destination is WordPress, stop here

This is worth saying plainly, because it is the one case where this tool is the wrong answer. If you are converting a Word document to Markdown in order to get it into WordPress, do not. The free DocxToPost plugin imports a .docx directly as a post, with headings, lists and tables intact as real blocks, and it uploads each image to your Media Library as a proper attachment.

Converting to Markdown first loses the images and gains you nothing. Use this tool when Markdown itself is the destination: a README, a docs site, a static site generator, an Obsidian vault, or a file you want to hand to something that only reads plain text.