--- title: "DOCX to Markdown" description: "Drop a Word .docx and get clean Markdown for a README, a wiki page or a site. Headings, lists, links, tables and emphasis are kept; fonts and layout are not. Nothing is uploaded." url: https://findutils.com/convert/docx-to-markdown/ category: convert --- # DOCX to Markdown Drop a Word .docx and get clean Markdown for a README, a wiki page or a site. Headings, lists, links, tables and emphasis are kept; fonts and layout are not. Nothing is uploaded. **Use this tool:** [DOCX to Markdown](https://findutils.com/convert/docx-to-markdown/) ## Programmatic access - Browser-only: this tool works on a file, the DOM, or a browser API and has no REST or MCP id. ## Why Use Our DOCX to Markdown Converter? Briefs, specs and policies get written in Word because that is where the people writing them live. READMEs, wikis, docs sites and static pages get written in Markdown because that is where the text ends up. The trip between them is done far too often by copying out of Word and cleaning up by hand, or by installing Pandoc for a one-off. This page reads the .docx in the tab and writes Markdown that keeps the structure a reader cares about — headings, paragraphs, lists, links, tables, bold and italic — and drops the styling a Markdown file cannot hold anyway. Copy it into the README, or download the .md. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What parts of the Word document are kept, and what is lost? Kept: headings that use Word's Heading styles, paragraphs, bold and italic, hyperlinks, bulleted and numbered lists, tables, and images if you turn the option on. Lost: fonts, colours, font sizes, text alignment, columns, page breaks, headers, footers, footnotes, comments and tracked changes. Markdown has no way to hold those, so they are dropped rather than approximated. ### Can it read an old .doc file? No. A .doc is a binary format from before 2007 and is not a zip of XML. Open it in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs and save it as .docx, then drop that. The page recognises a .doc by its first bytes and tells you this instead of failing silently. ### The file is password-protected. Why is it refused? A password-protected .docx is encrypted and wrapped in the same container format as a legacy .doc, so it cannot be unpacked without the password, and this page does not ask for one. Remove the protection in Word (File, Info, Protect Document) and save, then drop the unprotected file. ### What happens to images? By default they are left out and the count is shown, because a single embedded photo can be larger than the rest of the Markdown and most projects keep images in a folder anyway. Turn on Include images and each one is embedded as a data URL inside the Markdown, which is self-contained but large. Either way, the text around the image is unaffected. ### Do tables convert? Yes, to pipe tables with a header row. Merged cells, cells with several paragraphs and nested tables flatten, because a Markdown table cannot hold them. Check any table with long or complex cells; the text is there, the layout may not be. ### Is my document uploaded? No. The .docx is unpacked and converted in your browser. Nothing about the document is sent to FindUtils or to any other server, and you can confirm that in the network panel while converting. A brief or a contract is exactly the kind of file that should be converted this way. ### What are the conversion notes? A list of Word features the converter met and had no Markdown for — most often a custom paragraph style, a text box or an unusual list format. The text of those parts is still in the output as plain paragraphs. The notes tell you where to look if something reads as flatter than the original. ### Can I convert a Google Docs document? Yes. In Google Docs choose File, Download, Microsoft Word (.docx), then drop the downloaded file here. Google's export uses Heading styles and real lists, so the Markdown comes out clean. ### Can I go the other way, from Markdown to Word? Yes. The Markdown to Word converter on FindUtils builds a .docx from Markdown, with headings, lists, tables, code blocks and an optional header banner. Together the two pages make the round trip without leaving the site. ### Why did a bold line not become a heading? Because the document says it is a paragraph. The converter reads Word's styles, not its appearance: a line styled Heading 2 becomes ##, a line that is merely bold and 18 pt stays a bold paragraph. Apply the Heading styles in Word, or add the # characters in the editor on the right before you download. ### I need HTML instead of Markdown. Is there a page for that? Yes. The DOCX to HTML converter on FindUtils reads the same .docx and writes clean semantic HTML — headings, lists, links, tables and emphasis with no classes or inline styles — for a CMS, a blog or an email editor, with a preview and an optional full-document wrapper. ### My file is a LibreOffice .odt, not a .docx. What now? Use the ODT to Markdown converter, the LibreOffice twin of this page. It unpacks the .odt in the browser and writes Markdown with the same converter; the one difference is that it keeps text only and counts images instead of offering to embed them. ## Related Tools - [Markdown to Word](https://findutils.com/convert/markdown-to-word/) - [DOCX to HTML](https://findutils.com/convert/docx-to-html/) - [ODT to Markdown](https://findutils.com/convert/odt-to-markdown/) - [Markdown to PDF](https://findutils.com/convert/markdown-to-pdf/) - [Markdown Previewer](https://findutils.com/developers/markdown-previewer/) - [HTML to Markdown](https://findutils.com/convert/html-to-markdown/) - [Word to PDF Converter](https://findutils.com/convert/word-to-pdf/) - [Markdown Table Generator](https://findutils.com/text/markdown-table-generator/)