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

If you've been building LLM-powered applications, you've likely run into the same problem: your data lives in PDFs, Word documents, Excel sheets, and PowerPoint decks — but your AI pipeline expects clean text. Copy-pasting doesn't scale, and most conversion tools either strip too much structure or produce noisy output. Microsoft's MarkItDown is built specifically for this gap. It's a lightweight Python utility that converts a wide range of file formats into Markdown, preserving the structure tha