DOCX vs Markdown
| Property | DOCX | Markdown |
|---|---|---|
| Full name | Microsoft Word document (Office Open XML) | Markdown |
| File extensions | .docx | .md, .markdown |
| Created by | Microsoft; standardised as ECMA-376 and ISO/IEC 29500 | John Gruber, with Aaron Swartz |
| Introduced | 2007 (Word 2007) | 2004 |
| Compression | A ZIP archive of XML files and images | None: plain text with light formatting marks (#, *, -) |
| Opens on | Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice, Pages and most office apps | GitHub, Notion, Obsidian, Reddit, Discord, any text editor and AI chat apps |
| Best for | Documents people still need to edit | Notes, documentation, READMEs and text for AI models |
Why convert DOCX to Markdown?
Word is where many documents start, but Markdown is where they increasingly need to end up: documentation sites built on Docusaurus or MkDocs, README files, wikis, Obsidian vaults and prompts for AI models. Copying from Word and pasting into a Markdown editor loses headings and turns lists into plain lines; converting the .docx file keeps them.
The converter reads the document's own styles. Paragraphs styled as Heading 1, 2 or 3 become #, ## and ### headings, in any language. Bold, italic and strikethrough are kept, lists keep their nesting and numbering, tables become Markdown tables and hyperlinks stay clickable. Images become [Image: alt text] markers you can replace with real image links.
Comments, tracked deletions, headers and footers are left out, since they are not part of the main text. Old .doc files (Word 97–2003) are a different format: open them in Word, LibreOffice or Google Docs, save as .docx, then convert. If you have the document as a PDF instead, use PDF to Markdown.