MarkItDown: Microsoft's Tool for Converting Almost Anything to Markdown

Microsoft introduces MarkItDown, a Python tool and CLI that converts PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets, presentations, HTML, images, audio, ZIPs, and YouTube transcriptions into Markdown.

The article covers installation, command-line usage, and Python API examples for turning common business files into structured Markdown.

Optional plugins add OCR and LLM-based image descriptions, helping preserve more context from files that are hard to parse as plain text.

The tool is positioned as a simple way to feed documents into AI pipelines and improve retrieval and model input quality.