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How to convert a Word document to Markdown on a Mac
By Himanshu Ranjan · Updated 8 November 2026
Select the document in Finder, open FileDial and choose Convert › Convert to Markdown. Headings, lists, bold, italic and links are kept. Tables and images are dropped, so check the result if your document has them. It runs on your Mac with no upload.
What you get
Markdown is a lightweight markup language created by John Gruber and released on 9 March 2004. It writes headings, emphasis and links as plain text, which converts to HTML and diffs well in version control. Many docs sites, wikis and note apps use it.
FileDial's Convert › Convert to Markdown follows a clear rule from its note: headings, lists, bold, italic and links are kept, while tables and images are dropped. That makes it best for prose-heavy documents such as articles, notes and README-style text.
Steps
The process is the same for one file or a folder of them.
- Select one or more document files in Finder.
- Open the dial with the right Option key, or right-click and choose Open in FileDial.
- Choose Convert, then Convert to Markdown.
- Open the .md file in any text editor and look at the headings and lists first.
- If the document had tables or images, add them back by hand or keep the source for those parts.
Know the dropped parts before you convert
Because tables and images are dropped, a report full of tables will come out thin. Before converting, decide whether the table content matters. If it does, convert the table data separately: copy it into a spreadsheet and use Convert › Convert to CSV, or paste the table in manually.
Markdown has several flavors. The original description was informal, so CommonMark was released in 2014 as a standard, and GitHub Flavored Markdown (a 2017 spec built on CommonMark) added tables and task lists. Our tool's output uses the basics, which every flavor reads.
Related conversions
If your goal is a web page rather than Markdown, Convert › Convert to HTML makes an HTML copy. For plain text with no markup at all, use Convert › Convert to plain text. For an e-book, Convert › Convert to EPUB builds an EPUB 3 file with a table of contents from the headings; images are dropped there too.
Built-in alternative
macOS has no built-in Word to Markdown converter. You can copy text from Pages or Word and add the markup by hand, which is fine for a short note. Command-line tools such as pandoc do this well, but they need installing and a Terminal habit. FileDial covers the simple case without either.
Good and bad candidates for conversion
Convert prose: blog drafts, meeting notes, documentation, long-form articles. Headings and lists map cleanly to Markdown, and links survive. The output reads well in any editor and works in static site generators, wikis and note apps.
Think twice about documents that are mostly tables, such as price lists or schedules, and about documents where images carry meaning, such as manuals. The tool drops both, so you would be left with the surrounding text only. For those, keep the original or convert the table to CSV separately.
- Good: essays, notes, READMEs, documentation drafts
- Fine with a manual fix: reports with one or two tables
- Poor: spreadsheets in a document, picture-heavy manuals
Common mistakes and when FileDial fits
Open the .md in a text editor and scan for three things: heading levels that jumped from one to three, lists that merged into a paragraph, and long lines of text that were really manual line breaks. All are quick to fix by hand. If the Markdown is going into a repository, Developer › Convert line endings to LF gives Unix-style endings, and Developer › Remove BOM removes a byte-order mark that some tools dislike.
Markdown is deliberately simple, and that is its limit. John Gruber designed it for plain-text readability, and extensions such as GitHub Flavored Markdown added tables, strikethrough and task lists later. Converting from a rich document throws away anything Markdown cannot express, so the result is a starting point, not a perfect mirror.
If you need tables to survive, command-line converters such as pandoc handle them better, at the cost of installing and learning a tool. If you only need the words and structure, FileDial is quicker and keeps everything on your Mac. Check headings and links in the output, since they are the parts you will rely on.
Converting a document that is mostly tables and expecting a full result is the main one, since the note says tables are dropped. Another is assuming that every link target survives: check a few. People also forget that Markdown has no page layout, so page breaks, headers and footers vanish by design. If your next step is a PDF or a printout, convert from the Word file with To PDF › Convert to PDF, not from the Markdown.
Last, file names. A Markdown file used on a docs site often needs a lowercase, space-free name. Rename › Lowercase names and Rename › Remove spaces make that quick.
Questions
Does the Markdown keep tables and images from the Word file?
No. FileDial's note says tables and images are dropped, while headings, lists, bold, italic and links are kept. If your document depends on tables or pictures, convert it for the text only, and add those parts back by hand or keep the source alongside.
Is the original Word document changed?
No. The Markdown file is a new file beside the original, which stays as it was. Every result has Undo as well, so you can try the conversion on a document, look at the output, and remove it if it is not what you wanted.
Should I pick Markdown or HTML?
Pick Markdown for notes, docs sites and anything you will keep editing by hand, since it is lighter plain text. Pick HTML with Convert › Convert to HTML when you need a web page, because HTML is the markup browsers display directly.