Convert Word documents to Markdown

Turn .docx files into clean, portable Markdown — heading styles become # headings, lists stay lists, tables stay tables. No pasted-from-Word debris, and nothing leaves your Mac.

How to convert Word to Markdown

Drop a .docx file into Milldown (or a whole folder of them).Folder drops convert the entire tree into a mirrored Markdown structure.
Preview the result — Word's heading styles map to Markdown heading levels.Bold, italics, links, lists, and tables all survive the trip.
Copy, save, or add YAML front matter for your publishing pipeline.The Publishing preset emits Hugo/Jekyll-compatible headers.

Why convert Word documents to Markdown?

Version control — .docx is an opaque zip; Markdown diffs line-by-line in git, so document changes get reviewed like code.
Publishing — drafts written in Word drop straight into Hugo, Jekyll, or any static site without cleanup.
AI workflows — Markdown is the cheapest, cleanest way to get a document's substance into Claude or ChatGPT.
Longevity — plain text opens in fifty years; proprietary formats are a bet on one vendor.

An honest note on token costs. You will see other tools claim ~97% savings for Word files, by comparing Markdown against the raw OOXML inside the .docx. We measured it too — 30,600 tokens of XML against 1,045 of Markdown — and then discarded the comparison, because nothing sends a model raw OOXML. Every tool, and every chat client you drop a .docx into, extracts the text first. Against that — the thing that actually happens — Markdown costs the same: 1,042 tokens versus 1,045 on the same document.

So Milldown shows no savings figure for Word files. What conversion buys you here is structure: real headings, tables and lists that plain extraction flattens into an undifferentiated wall of text, and a file you can diff, index and commit.

Format notes

Milldown converts modern Word files (.docx, Word 2007 and later). For legacy .doc files, open them in Word or Pages once and save as .docx first. Tracked changes are flattened to the accepted text; comments aren't carried across.

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