All resources
Setup
MarkItDown — Turn Any File Into Clean Text for AI
A free Microsoft tool that rewrites PDFs, Word files, slide decks and spreadsheets as clean text an AI can actually read. Runs on your own machine — no upload, no account, no page limits.
Download the PDF
Free. No email, no signup — the link downloads it.
Most online PDF-to-text sites want an email address, cap you at a handful of pages, and upload your document to their server. MarkItDown does the same job on your own machine, for free, and keeps the structure intact — headings stay headings, tables stay tables. This walks you from checking your Python version to converting your first file.
What's inside
- Install Python and MarkItDown, on Mac or Windows
- Drag a file into Terminal instead of typing out its path
- What you get back from PDFs, audio, images and YouTube links
- The externally-managed-environment error, and the flag that fixes it