DOCX to Markdown Converter — Free & Online

Why convert Word to Markdown?

Portable plain text you can put in Git, a static site, or an LLM prompt.

How to convert DOCX to Markdown

Three steps and a few seconds.

1. 1

   Drop your .docx file

   Drag and drop the document or browse your device. Word 2007 format and newer.

2. 2

   Conversion runs locally

   Styles are mapped to Markdown syntax on your own device — nothing is uploaded.

3. 3

   Copy or download

   Copy the Markdown to your clipboard or save it as a .md file.

Working with other formats? Convert PDF to Markdown, turn Markdown back into a PDF, or make a Markdown table from CSV.

How a .docx becomes Markdown

A .docx file is a ZIP archive containing XML. Inside it, your document is described as a sequence of paragraphs, each tagged with a style name, plus runs of text carrying their own formatting. The conversion unzips that archive in the browser, maps the semantic parts of the XML to HTML, and then converts the HTML to Markdown with turndown.

The reason it goes through HTML rather than straight to Markdown is that HTML shares Markdown's model — a heading is a heading, a list is a list — while Word's XML mixes meaning and appearance freely. Translating once into a structured intermediate produces far cleaner output than pattern-matching the XML directly.

This also sets the boundary of what can be converted. Anything Word expresses as genuine structure comes through. Anything expressed purely as visual styling has no Markdown equivalent and is dropped.

What converts, and what does not

Converts cleanly: Heading 1 through Heading 6 styles, bullet and numbered lists including nesting, bold, italic, strikethrough, hyperlinks, blockquotes and simple tables.

Does not convert, because Markdown has no way to say it: font choices, colours, sizes, text alignment, page breaks, columns, headers and footers, comments, tracked changes, and text boxes. If a document's meaning depends on any of these, that meaning is in the layout rather than the content, and it will not survive the trip.

The frequent trap is a document where headings were never styled as headings — someone typed a line and made it bold and 16pt by hand. Word has no idea that line is a heading, so neither does the converter, and it arrives as bold body text. Applying real heading styles in Word before converting fixes it, and improves the .docx as well.

Why teams move out of Word at all

Markdown is plain text, so it works with the tools built for plain text. It diffs cleanly in Git, so a pull request can show exactly which sentence changed. It drops straight into Obsidian, Notion, GitHub, Docusaurus, Hugo, Jekyll and Astro without an import step. And it is readable as-is, without the application that created it.

That last point is the durable argument. A .docx depends on software that can interpret a specific binary-adjacent format. A .md file is legible in any text editor, on any operating system, indefinitely. For documentation and notes meant to outlast the tool that made them, that difference compounds. Because there is no server round trip, the tools keep working with the network disconnected. Load the page, turn off Wi-Fi, and the conversion still runs — which is the most direct proof available that nothing is being uploaded.

Frequently asked questions