MarkItDown

MarkItDown is Microsoft's official MCP server for converting basically anything into Markdown. PDFs, Word docs, PowerPoint slides, Excel sheets, audio files, video files, images with OCR, and even web pages. It's a single tool that handles the messy work of extraction so your LLM can actually read the content. I've used this for two main workflows. First, turning client PDFs into something Claude can actually parse without choking on formatting. Second, bulk-converting a folder of old Word docs into a searchable knowledge base. Both worked without fuss. The output is clean, properly structured Markdown with headings intact and tables converted to pipe syntax. Audio transcription uses Whisper under the hood, which means it's accurate but slow on longer files. Images get OCR'd via Tesseract, which works fine for typed text but struggles with handwriting. The real win here is that it's officially maintained by Microsoft, so it's not going to vanish or break with the next Python update. The conversion quality is better than most open-source alternatives I've tried. PDFs with complex layouts come out readable, not a jumbled mess. Office files retain their structure. Web pages get stripped of navigation and ads, leaving just the content. Quirks: video conversion extracts audio first, then transcribes it, so you're not getting visual content analysed. Excel sheets turn into Markdown tables, which is fine for small datasets but unwieldy for anything over a few dozen rows. The tool doesn't batch-process natively, you're calling it once per file. For large archives, you'll want to script that yourself. Who shouldn't bother: if you're only dealing with plain text or already have a working PDF pipeline, this adds nothing. If you need real-time conversion of massive files, the processing time will frustrate you. But if you're regularly feeding documents, slides, or media into Claude and tired of copy-paste nonsense, this is the tool. It does one thing well and doesn't pretend to do more.