Free Online Word to Markdown Converter
Drag and drop a .docx file and get clean, plain-text GitHub Flavored Markdown back. No upload, no watermark.
Updated June 25, 2026
Word to Markdown conversion reads the structural styles in your .docx file, such as Heading 1, Heading 2, bullet lists, tables, bold, and italic, and outputs clean, plain-text Markdown. MDTool converts Word to Markdown entirely in your browser using mammoth.js to extract the document structure and turndown to render it as GitHub Flavored Markdown, free, with no login and no file size limit.
How to Convert Word to Markdown
Drop a .docx file onto the left panel and MDTool reads the document's XML structure, including named heading styles, list formatting, and table grids, and converts them to Markdown syntax in seconds, entirely inside your browser tab.
- Drag and drop your .docx file onto the left panel, or click Choose .docx file to browse your computer
- MDTool reads the file using mammoth.js to extract the Word document's structural XML and map named styles to HTML elements
- turndown with the GFM plugin then converts the intermediate HTML to GitHub Flavored Markdown
- The Markdown output appears in the right panel; click Copy to copy it to your clipboard, or Download .md to save it as a file
What Gets Converted
mammoth.js maps Word's named paragraph styles to Markdown elements. These are the formatting types that Word explicitly marks in the file's XML, not visual appearance, but structural intent.
| Word element | Markdown output | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Heading 1 to Heading 6 styles | # through ###### | ✅ Preserved |
| Bold and italic text | **bold** / *italic* | ✅ Preserved |
| Bullet lists | - item | ✅ Preserved |
| Numbered lists | 1. item | ✅ Preserved |
| Hyperlinks | [text](url) | ✅ Preserved |
| Simple tables | | col | col | | ✅ Converted to pipe tables |
| Manually formatted text (no named style) | Treated as body text | ⚠️ Loses formatting |
| Embedded images | Not included | ❌ Not extracted |
| Tracked changes, comments | Stripped | ❌ Not included |
What Does Not Convert Cleanly
Some Word features have no Markdown equivalent and are stripped or simplified during conversion. Knowing these in advance saves cleanup time:
- Embedded images: Not extracted. Images disappear from the output because mammoth.js does not base64-encode or reference embedded media by default. Re-add images manually after conversion. If preserving images matters, use Pandoc with
--extract-mediainstead. - Tracked changes and comments: Word's revision markup and comment annotations are not surfaced in the output. Only the accepted (current) version of the text is included. Accept or reject all changes in Word before converting.
- Complex table merges: GFM pipe tables have no support for
colspanorrowspan. Merged cells are split into individual cells. Rebuild merged-cell tables manually or use an HTML table fallback. - Manual formatting without named styles: Text made bigger or bolder by hand, rather than through a Word heading style, is stored in the XML as plain body text with font overrides. mammoth.js correctly treats it as body text, not a heading, because Word itself doesn't classify it structurally. Apply named heading styles in Word before converting.
- Font colors, custom fonts, and underlines: These are presentational properties with no Markdown equivalent and are dropped silently.
Why Convert Word to Markdown
Markdown is the plain-text format that most developer tools, documentation platforms, and publishing systems natively understand. Word's .docx format is a binary XML archive, useful for page-layout editing, but awkward when content needs to move into a version-controlled workflow or a platform that expects plain text.
Scale makes this concrete: GitHub's 2025 Octoverse report counted 630 million repositories on the platform, with 230+ new repositories created every minute. Every repository that includes documentation files expects Markdown, not .docx, and the same is true for static site generators, Obsidian vaults, and every major docs-as-code platform.
- GitHub and GitLab: README files, wiki pages, and documentation in repositories use Markdown (specifically GFM). A .docx file cannot be committed as a rendered README. Convert to .md first.
- Obsidian: Obsidian vaults store notes as plain .md files. Word documents cannot be opened directly in Obsidian, so convert first, then drop the .md into your vault. See converting Word documents for Obsidian.
- Static site generators (Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, Astro): These tools render pages from Markdown source files. Content written in Word needs a clean .md conversion before it can be published through a static site pipeline.
- Docs-as-code platforms (MkDocs, Docusaurus): Documentation sites that live alongside source code in a Git repository expect Markdown source. Converting a Word-based doc library to Markdown enables version control and pull-request review workflows for documentation.
- Notion, Ghost, and Hashnode: These publishing tools support Markdown import or paste. A converted .md file pastes cleanly with headings and formatting intact, without reformatting everything from scratch.
Is MDTool Free?
Yes, free to use, no account required, and no file size limit. MDTool is a client-side converter: the conversion logic runs as JavaScript in your browser tab. Your .docx file is never uploaded to a server, which means there is no infrastructure cost per conversion and therefore no reason to charge for it or cap file sizes.
The two libraries powering the conversion, mammoth.js and turndown are open-source MIT-licensed projects. You can verify the behavior, inspect the source, or use the libraries directly in your own projects. MDTool bundles them into a drag-and-drop interface so you don't need Node.js or a command line to get a quick conversion done.
Frequently Asked Questions
Modern .docx files (Word 2007 and later, the ECMA-376 Office Open XML standard). Legacy .doc files (Word 97 to 2003 binary format) are not supported. Open the file in Word and use File → Save As → .docx first.