Seamlessly convert Markdown documents to Office formats with Pandoc: A how-to guide

Harness the power of Pandoc to convert documents using this tutorial.

I have been experimenting a lot with Ollama and other artificial intelligence tools. The answers to my prompts are always rendered in Markdown, which is useful. I have Marktext on my Linux computer and MacDown on my MacBook Air so I can easily copy and paste the output into either of those editors and save it as a Markdown file on my computer.

However, when I want to share those files with colleagues who are unfamiliar with Markdown I need a way to convert those files into a format that’s easily accessible for them. My Markdown editors can only export the Markdown files as HTML or PDF.

Read more: Enhance your writing skills with Ollama and Phi3

Enhance your documentation workflow with Pandoc

That problem is easily solved with Pandoc which is a great tool that anyone can install on Linux, MacOS, or Windows that easily converts Markdown into any number of different formats. Easily install Pandoc on Linux with the following commands:

$ sudo apt install pandoc

or

$ sudo apt install pandoc

On MacOS, use Homebrew to easily install Pandoc by opening a terminal and entering the following command:

$ brew install pandoc

You can install Pandoc on Microsoft Windows using Chocolatey with the following command:

choco install pandoc

Once the application is installed it works very well from the command line. The project maintains great documentation. I needed to convert a Markdown document to .docx so my Windows using colleagues could easily read the output from the Large Language Model (LLM) I’ve been using. I used the documentation and the programs man page on my Linux system to enter the following command.

$ pandoc -o ProposedLease.docx -f markdown -t docx LeaseReview.md

The conversion was flawless and occurred in a second or two. Your experience may vary based on CPU, RAM and length of the document converted. The Markdown file of our lease review was converted to “ProposedLease.docx” which I could easily share with my colleagues who were using Microsoft Word.

If you are a person who is uncomfortable installing software on your computer or you are an unpriviledged user in a corporate or educational setting you can use Pandoc online. Pandooc is open source with a GPL v2 license. For more information about Pandoc be sure to consult their website and examine all of the options that the program provides you.

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This article is adapted from “Seamlessly convert your Markdown docs to Office formats using Pandoc” by Don Watkins, and is republished with permission from the author.