Convert PowerPoint to Markdown

Extract the substance from .pptx decks as structured Markdown — slide titles, bullet content, and tables — without opening PowerPoint. Entirely on your Mac.

How it works

Drop the .pptx into Milldown.Batch as many decks as you like — each converts independently.
Each slide's text content lands in order: titles, bullets, and tables.Layout and design are deliberately left behind — this is about the content.
Copy into your notes, your AI chat, or export retrieval-ready chunks.The Refine menu splits long decks into ~1k-token chunks with front matter.

What people use it for

Meeting prep — read a 60-slide deck as two pages of text instead of clicking through slides.
Knowledge bases — decks are where institutional knowledge goes to hide; Markdown makes it searchable in Obsidian or Notion.
AI summarization — paste the whole deck's substance into Claude as structured text it can actually follow.
RAG pipelines — chunked, front-mattered slide content indexes cleanly in a vector store.

An honest note on token costs. A .pptx really is mostly markup — 61,000 tokens of XML around 630 tokens of actual words. But that 99% figure would be measuring against something nobody does: no tool feeds a model raw slide XML, and the plain text extraction that does happen costs about the same as the Markdown. Milldown therefore shows no savings figure for PowerPoint.

The reason to convert a deck is that slide XML has no reading order a model can follow, while Markdown gives it one — slide titles as headings, bullets as lists, speaker notes as text.

Limits worth knowing

Charts, images, and SmartArt are visual objects — they don't have a faithful text form and aren't invented. What you get is every piece of real text in the deck, in slide order.

Try it on your own files

Milldown converts PDFs, Office documents, web pages, and scans into clean Markdown — entirely on your Mac. Free for 14 days.

Get Milldown for macOS

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · $39 one-time after trial (excl. VAT) · no subscription