How to convert Word (DOCX) to Markdown

Word documents are hard to diff, hard to put in Git, and locked to one application. Word to Markdown reads a .docx in your browser and converts it to plain, portable Markdown you can version, search, and publish anywhere.

What survives the trip

The converter reads Word's underlying structure — not just the visible text — so formatting that was applied with styles comes through:

• Heading 1/2/3 styles → #, ##, ###
• Bold and italic → **bold**, *italic*
• Bulleted and numbered lists → Markdown lists
• Tables → Markdown tables (best-effort)
• Hyperlinks → [text](url)

The lesson: documents written with Word's styles convert far better than documents formatted by hand. If someone made a "heading" by selecting text and bumping the font size to 18pt bold, Markdown sees bold text, not a heading.

What has no Markdown equivalent

Markdown is deliberately simple, so Word features beyond its vocabulary are dropped or flattened:

• Tracked changes and comments — not represented.
• Text boxes, columns, and precise positioning — flattened to linear text.
• Embedded images — referenced as placeholders; re-add them where you need them.
• Fonts, colors, and sizes — discarded (Markdown carries meaning, not styling).

A short cleanup pass

After converting, scan for two things: headings that came through as plain bold (promote them with #), and tables that need column alignment. For tables specifically, the Markdown Table Formatter will straighten the columns in one click.

Privacy

Parsing happens locally; the document is never uploaded. That makes it safe for internal policies, contracts, and drafts you can't send to an online service.

Use it to migrate documentation out of Word, bring a collaborator's edits back into your Markdown source, or simply free a document from a format you've outgrown. Going the other way — delivering Markdown to a Word user — is Markdown to Word.