Nifty new convert-to-Markdown library from a small indie development shop named Microsoft:

The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.)

It presently supports:

• PDF (.pdf)
• PowerPoint (.pptx)
• Word (.docx)
• Excel (.xlsx)
• Images (EXIF metadata, and OCR)
• Audio (EXIF metadata, and speech transcription)
• HTML (special handling of Wikipedia, etc.)
• Various other text-based formats (csv, json, xml, etc.)

The API is simple:

from markitdown import MarkItDown

markitdown = MarkItDown()
result = markitdown.convert("test.xlsx")
print(result.text_content)

Via Stephan Ango (CEO of the excellent, popular Markdown writing and note-taking app Obsidian), who also points out that Google Docs added Markdown export a few months ago. I’ve never used Google Docs other than to read documents created by others, but MarkItDown seems like a library I might make great use of. “MarkItDown” is even a great name. What a world.

Not bad for a 20-year-old syntax.