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.

A 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. Our corpus reproduces it — 83,941 tokens of XML against 4,916 of Markdown, or 94% — and then discards 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: 4,916 tokens versus 4,901 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.

Before and after, on a real document

A vendor-review memo with proper Word heading styles and a table (the file is in our benchmark corpus):

Plain text extraction

Q3 Vendor Review — Northwind Supply
Prepared by Operations, 4 August…
Summary
Northwind met 94% of delivery SLAs…
Open escalations
Ref
Issue
Owner
Due
NW-114
Damaged packaging, lot 5511…

Milldown

# Q3 Vendor Review — Northwind Supply

## Summary
Northwind met 94% of delivery SLAs…

## Open escalations
| Ref | Issue | Owner | Due |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| NW-114 | Damaged packaging… |

Same words, same token cost — but plain extraction shreds the table into a one-word-per-line list and flattens headings into indistinguishable text. Structure is what a .docx conversion buys.

Further reading: Measured token savings by file type · Importing Word docs and PDFs into Obsidian · Batch-converting a folder of Word and PDF files

Try it on your own files

Milldown converts PDFs, Office documents, web pages, and scans into clean Markdown — entirely on your computer. Free for 7 days.

Download for macOS

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