MarkItDown: An opensource library from Microsoft

It helps converting documents to MarkDown format, which is very easy for machines to understand

Back in November, Microsoft quietly open-sourced MarkItDown, a powerful Python library that converts almost any document into Markdown - a format that’s both human-readable and AI-friendly.

This is big news for anyone working with LLMs or exploring multi-modal AI.

🟢 Why it matters: Markdown has become the go-to format for structuring data that LLMs can efficiently process. It simplifies converting complex documents into something AI can understand.

It supports:

• PDFs
• Word
• PowerPoint
• Excel
• images (EXIF metadata and OCR)
• audio (speech transcription)
• HTML, CSV, JSON, XML
• ZIP files

A few interesting facts:

1️⃣ Legacy docs easier to process: It could help taking legacy documents and making them accessible for LLMs to analyze, summarize, or even act on. Before it required a lot of analyzing

2️⃣ Opensource: It’s open-source and as easy as !pip install markitdown. Now, it's much easier and accessible to prep data for AI workflows, from small teams to massive enterprises.

3️⃣ Excels/CSV easier for RAG: these doc types are typically hard to understand as they are not easy to understand for an LLM, not any longer.

MarkItDown could impact profoundly how we prepare content for AI, unlocking new efficiencies across industries.

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