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← Own your AI · Mission 8 of 31

Turn any Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF into text your AI can actually read

Microsoft's free MarkItDown turns office files into clean Markdown, with the headings, tables and speaker notes kept. Paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or your own local AI. It runs on your laptop and uploads nothing.

35 minBeginnerTools: FreeStep 1 free
Tested 9 Oct 2026 · MarkItDown 0.1.8, Python 3.12 via uv 0.11.9, Windows PowerShell 5.1, Windows 11
MarkItDown installedone command that turns Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files into Markdown
Text any AI can read properly, including a local model in the terminal, which can't open a .docx at all
A copy-paste loop that converts a whole folder in one go
  • Exactly what each file type keeps and loses, so you know when to trust the result
  • Optional: Claude Desktop converting files for you through the MarkItDown MCP server
Before you start
  • Windows 10 or 11, a Mac, or Linux
  • About 300MB of free disk space
  • A few files to try. Use copies of your own, or anything you're happy to experiment on. Nothing gets uploaded.
  • Optional, for the last step: Ollama and a model from Run a ChatGPT-style AI on your own laptop. Gemma 4 needs Ollama 0.20.7 or newer: check with ollama --version.
01/06Install MarkItDown0 done
STEP 01 of 06~5 min

Install MarkItDown

One command, no admin rights. uv keeps it in its own folder so it can't break anything else on your PC.

  1. MarkItDown is a free, open-source tool from Microsoft (MIT licence). It's written in Python, but you don't need to know any Python: a small installer called uv handles all of that. If you already have uv from another lesson, skip straight to the MarkItDown install.

    Windows (only if you don't have uv)
    winget install --id astral-sh.uv -e
    Mac (only if you don't have uv)
    brew install uv
    Mac without Homebrew, or Linux (only if you don't have uv)
    curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

  2. Close the terminal, open a new one, then install MarkItDown with the file types this mission uses:

    Terminal
    uv tool install "markitdown[pdf,docx,pptx,xlsx,xls,outlook]" --python 3.12

  3. The bit in square brackets is the list of file types to support: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel (new and old) and Outlook emails. --python 3.12 tells uv which Python to use, and uv downloads it for you if needed. The install takes about 20 seconds on a decent connection and uses 220MB, plus about 60MB for Python 3.12.

    CarefulDon't use markitdown[all], even though MarkItDown's README suggests it. [all] asks for an optional Azure cloud add-on that only exists as a pre-release, and uv won't use pre-releases unless told to, so it quietly installs version 0.1.5, an old one from February. Listing the file types, as above, gets the current version and skips cloud add-ons you don't need.

  4. Check it worked:

    Terminal
    markitdown --version
    Output
    markitdown 0.1.8
✓
Checkpointmarkitdown --version prints 0.1.8 or newer.
If it breaks'markitdown' is not recognised + 2 more
'markitdown' is not recognised
uv puts its apps in a folder your terminal doesn't know about yet. Run uv tool update-shell, close the terminal, open a new one and try again.
It says 0.1.5
You installed with [all]. Run uv tool uninstall markitdown, then the install command above.
'uv' is not recognised (or 'command not found')
Close the terminal and open a new window after installing uv. New windows pick up newly installed programs, old ones don't.
Still stuck? Ask the community
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