> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://kindling.birklid.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# MarkItDown
> Microsoft's Python utility for converting PDFs, Word docs, PowerPoint, Excel, images, and audio into clean Markdown for LLM pipelines.
Open Source
Applications Layer
# MarkItDown
**Convert virtually any file format into clean, LLM-ready Markdown — PDFs, Office documents, images, audio, and more.**
Open Source (MIT)
Applications
Python
122k+
## What it is
MarkItDown is a lightweight Python utility from Microsoft that converts almost any document format — PDFs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, images, HTML, audio — into clean Markdown output. It preserves structural information (headings, lists, tables, links) while discarding visual formatting, producing output that modern LLMs understand natively. With 122k+ GitHub stars, it has become a standard pre-processing step in AI document pipelines.
The project exists because Markdown sits at the sweet spot between plain text and rich markup that LLMs handle well. It's intentionally a pre-processing utility, not a standalone document converter — the output is optimized for feeding into an LLM context or RAG pipeline rather than for human reading.
**Use this when** you need to feed arbitrary documents into an LLM pipeline without losing structural context — turn a 50-page PDF into a form Claude or GPT can actually reason over.
## Get started
Source, pip install, and format support matrix.
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