Convert Markdown into a Word Document

I write everything in Markdown but needed a way to produce Word documents for the old skool.

I love Markdown, the handy, simple way to format plain text.

I write pretty much everything in Markdown from emails to user research notes to reports, I even wrote my book in Markdown.

While it is a great format the business world is still firmly wedded to Microsoft Word. I’d been searching for a way of converting from Markdown to Word and came across Pandoc.

Pandoc is the “swiss army knife of text conversion” and is a package install that is used through the scary (not really) Terminal. Once installed it’s actually pretty straightforward for folk not used to the terminal. (NB this is for a Mac)

• Save your Markdown document as filename.md to the desktop
• Open the Terminal, you can find it in Applications » Utilities
• Enter: cd Desktop to navigate to the Desktop
• Enter: ls to list your files
• Enter: pandoc -o output.docx -f markdown -t docx filename.md

And hey presto you have a formatted word document.

Update Rian van der Merwe suggested using Marked which seems to do it automatically and costs $13.