Guides
Guides
Every converter has a page that says what it does. These are for what comes after — the file that converted badly, and the reason why.
One guide per conversion engine, plus one on keeping the file off the network — all written from the questions people actually send in. Each links straight to the tool it's about.
What survives when Word becomes Markdown
Which parts of a .docx come through as Markdown and which are dropped on purpose. Headings, lists, tables and emphasis survive as structure; fonts, colours and page layout don't. How to tell them apart before you convert.
Uses Word → MD
PDF to Markdown, and why the structure is guesswork
A PDF has no headings, paragraphs or lists — only glyphs at coordinates. Here's how structure gets inferred from font size and spacing, what that gets wrong, and why a scanned page produces nothing at all.
Uses PDF → MD
Getting Markdown out of a Google Doc
Two ways out of a Google Doc, and what each one costs you. Pasting is faster and loses images; exporting .docx keeps them. Neither one needs access to your Drive.
Uses Google Docs → MD
HTML to Markdown
Which HTML tags map to Markdown, which are removed for safety, and what happens to tables, code blocks and inline styles. Plus the two knobs that change the output shape.
Uses HTML → MD
CSV to a Markdown table
How the delimiter gets detected, what happens to commas and newlines inside quoted fields, how the alignment row works, and what the 100,000-cell limit means in practice.
Uses CSV → MD
Excel to Markdown: formulas and formatting
Formulas convert to their calculated values, and there's one case where they come out empty. Plus what happens to currency and percentage formats, dates, merged cells and multiple sheets.
Uses Excel → MD
Turning Word into Markdown without the file leaving your computer
The .docx is unzipped in this browser tab, not sent to a server. How to confirm that yourself, why a plain-text result is the private part, and what converting in the browser still can't protect.
Uses Word → MD