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MarkItDown
Microsoft’s tool for converting Office files and PDFs into Markdown.
What it does
A Python command-line tool that converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, images (with OCR), and more into Markdown — the plain-text format that AI assistants and note systems read best.
Why it matters
AI works dramatically better on clean text than on binary documents. MarkItDown is the bridge between decades of Office files and modern AI workflows — maintained by Microsoft itself.
Who it’s for
People building AI pipelines, researchers with folders of papers, teams migrating knowledge bases to plain text.
What you can build with it
- A script that turns a reports folder into a searchable knowledge base
- Pre-processing for a company chatbot
- Clean Markdown archives of old presentations