Convert a Word Document (.docx) to Markdown
Upload a .docx file and get clean Markdown back. Headings, bold/italic, lists, tables, links, and images all convert — entirely in your browser, nothing uploaded to a server.
Older .doc files aren't supported — only the newer .docx format (Word 2007+, Open XML). If you have a .doc file, open it in Word or Google Docs and re-save/export as .docx first.
How to convert a Word document to Markdown
Upload a .docx file and this tool converts it to clean Markdown entirely in your browser — the file is never uploaded to a server. Under the hood it uses mammoth.js to turn the Word document into HTML (mammoth's own docs recommend this over its now-deprecated direct Markdown output), then converts that HTML to Markdown with Turndown — the same HTML-to-Markdown pipeline used by our HTML to Markdown tool, so tables, task lists, and GFM formatting are handled consistently across both tools.
What converts well
- Headings — paragraphs styled "Heading 1"–"Heading 6" in Word become
#–######Markdown headings - Bold, italic, strikethrough — standard character formatting
- Bulleted and numbered lists, including nested lists
- Tables — converted to GFM Markdown tables (see the header-row note below)
- Links — hyperlinks convert to
[text](url) - Images — embedded directly, see the note below
- Footnotes and endnotes — converted to numbered reference links pointing to a notes list at the end of the document
- Quote-styled paragraphs ("Quote", "Intense Quote", "Block Text" styles) — converted to Markdown blockquotes
Known limitations — read before relying on this for a large document
| What | What actually happens |
|---|---|
| Table header rows | A Markdown table needs a header row to be valid. Word only marks a table's header row if you explicitly used the "Repeat Header Rows" table option — most tables don't have this set. When it's missing, this tool treats the first row of every table as the header (same assumption our other spreadsheet-to-Markdown tools make). If a table's first row genuinely isn't a header, fix it manually in the output. |
| Images | Embedded as base64 data: URIs directly inside the Markdown () — this is mammoth's default browser behaviour, and it means images survive the conversion without any extra steps. The tradeoff: output can get large fast, and some platforms (static site generators, some CMSes) don't handle inline data-URI images well. For docs going into a README, wiki, or blog, consider re-exporting the images from Word separately and swapping in real image URLs. |
| Underline | Dropped silently — Markdown has no native underline syntax, so underlined text converts to plain text. |
| Headers & footers | Not included — only the main document body is converted. |
| Comments & tracked changes | Not preserved. Accept or reject tracked changes and resolve/delete comments in Word before converting, for predictable output. |
| Complex layout (columns, text boxes, custom fonts/colors) | Word's visual styling is intentionally not carried over — only the document's structural formatting (headings, emphasis, lists, tables, links) converts, matching how Markdown itself works. |
Use cases
- Migrating docs written in Word into a Markdown-based wiki, README, or static site generator
- Turning a spec, proposal, or report received as a
.docxattachment into something you can diff and version-control in Git - Cleaning up content pasted from Word into a CMS that only accepts Markdown
- Archiving legacy Word documents in a plain-text, future-proof format
For a deeper look at what does and doesn't survive this kind of conversion, see our companion guide: How to Convert Word Documents to Markdown.
Related tools
- Markdown to Word (.docx) — go the other direction: turn Markdown into a real Word document
- HTML to Markdown — same conversion pipeline, for pasted HTML instead of an uploaded file
- Markdown Live Editor — clean up and preview the converted Markdown
- Markdown Table Formatter — realign any tables after conversion
- Markdown Linter — check the converted document for structural issues