Updated October 14, 2026. Written for WordCraft 0.6.1 (what changed since).
Steps
- Open the editor at wordcraft.run/editor.
- Open the .md file. Drag it onto the page, or use Browse… under File › Open. WordCraft reads it as Markdown and lays it out as pages.
- Clean up the top. If the file starts with a
---block of YAML (title, date, tags), delete it now; see below for why. Type the title as the first line and apply the Title style from the Styles gallery if you want one. - Give it a look. The Design tab changes every heading and paragraph at once with a theme or style set. Because the headings are real heading styles, References › Table of Contents builds a contents page from them.
- Save with Ctrl/⌘+S.
notes.mdis saved asnotes.docx; Save always writes a Word document, whatever you opened.
What each piece of Markdown becomes
WordCraft reads most of CommonMark, the standard Markdown, plus GitHub's tables and strikethrough. This is what lands in the Word file:
| Markdown | In the .docx |
|---|---|
# Title to ###### Title, or text underlined with === / --- | Heading 1 to Heading 6 styles |
*italic*, **bold**, ~~struck~~ | Italic, bold, strikethrough |
`code` | Text in Courier New |
| Fenced or indented code blocks | One paragraph per line in a Code style |
> quoted text | Paragraphs in the Quote style |
- item, 1. item, nested by indenting | Bulleted and numbered Word lists, with levels |
Pipe tables, with :---: alignment | Word tables with a header row and the column alignment |
[text](https://…) and <https://…> | Clickable links |
--- on its own line, after a blank line | A paragraph with a bottom border (a horizontal line) |
Two spaces or \ at the end of a line, <br> | A line break inside the paragraph |
Headings, lists and tables arriving as styles rather than as bold or indented text is the main reason to convert this way instead of pasting rendered Markdown into Word: your reader's Navigation pane, contents page and style changes all work on the result.
What doesn't convert, and the fix
- YAML front matter. WordCraft's Markdown reader has no metadata block, so the opening
---becomes a horizontal line, and the last line of the block followed by the closing---reads as a Heading 2 (for example a heading sayingtags: draft). Delete the block before you save, or in the .md file before you open it. - Pictures stored as separate files. A browser tab only gets the one file you opened, so
turns into its alt text, "chart". Put the picture back with Insert › Pictures, or paste it from the clipboard. Pictures embedded in the Markdown itself asdata:URIs do come through. - Footnotes (
[^1]), task lists (- [ ]) and math ($x^2$) aren't part of the Markdown WordCraft reads and stay as plain characters. Word footnotes can be added afterwards from the References tab; for many of them, use Pandoc. - Fonts. In the browser the document is drawn with WordCraft's built-in fonts, and code spans show in a built-in monospaced face. The .docx keeps the font names, so Word displays them with its own fonts.
Word to Markdown, the other way
Open a .docx and choose File › Export › Markdown (*.md). The same constructs come out: headings, emphasis, lists, tables, links and code. Each picture becomes a placeholder such as ; the picture files themselves aren't exported, so save them separately if you need them. If the document has comments and you tick Print Markup on the File tab's Print page, the comments are listed at the end of the Markdown copy.
That's handy for turning a Word draft into a README or a page for a static site. It's also how to feed a Word document to a chatbot as clean text; the AI writing assistant next to the editor does that conversion for you when you save.
When Pandoc or Google Docs is the better route
Pandoc is the standard command-line converter, free and open source; version 3.12.1 came out on October 8, 2026, with installers for Windows, macOS and Linux. One command does it:
pandoc notes.md -o notes.docxPandoc's own Markdown has footnotes, YAML metadata (the title block becomes the document title), definition lists and citations, and its --reference-doc option takes the styles, margins, headers and footers from a Word file you already have. If you convert the same kind of document every week, or you need your company template applied, set Pandoc up once. What it doesn't give you is a page to look at and fix before sending.
Google Docs opens a .md through File › Open › Upload and can then download it in another format, Word included. The file goes into your Google Drive on the way, which is fine for a shopping list and a reason to think twice about a client report.
Our rule of thumb: one file that needs to look right, WordCraft; a repeatable pipeline or an academic paper, Pandoc.
Check before you send
Open the saved .docx again and look at three places: the first lines (no stray heading from front matter), every spot where the Markdown had an image, and the widest table, which may need narrower columns or landscape pages (Layout › Orientation) to fit. Then export a PDF as well if your reader only needs to read it.