Convert a mixed folder of office files into Markdown you can diff

A project folder full of PDF exports, a Word spec, a spreadsheet of field names, and a handful of screenshots is hard to search and worse to review in git. I convert that pile to Markdown, edit the Markdown, and export only the format someone actually asked for.

The converter I use is MarkAny, a browser tool between common office files and Markdown. It batch-converts PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, EPUB, and images, with OCR for scans and images, and it can write edited Markdown back out to DOCX, PDF, HTML, PNG, JPG, WebP, EPUB, PPTX, or XLSX. I work on this product. This post was generated with AI assistance.

Steps

1. Sort the folder before you upload. Put scans and screenshots in one group and real text documents in another. OCR and text extraction fail in different ways, and mixing them hides which file needs a retry.
2. Convert the document group to Markdown in one batch. Open each result and check three things: headings are still headings, tables are still tables, and running headers or footers were not pasted into every section.
3. Run the image group separately so OCR is actually used. Read the first page of each result against the image. If a heading is missing or two columns merged into one, retry that file instead of hand-fixing a bad parse. Per-file review is the reason not to dump fifty files into one blob.
4. Edit the Markdown in your repo. This is where the conversion pays off: you can diff a spec, comment on a line, and search for a field name.
5. Export only what a reader asked for. A DOCX if they will comment in Word, a PDF for a snapshot, HTML for a preview. Do not export every format "just in case". You will not know which file is current.
6. Keep the Markdown as the source of truth, and put the date in the export filename.

What tends to go wrong

• Converting a scanned PDF on the non-OCR path and getting an empty file. If the text layer is empty, the file needed OCR.
• Trusting a spreadsheet conversion without checking merged cells. One merged header can shift every column.
• Editing the exported DOCX and the Markdown as if both were the source. Pick one. For me that is the Markdown.

If a single file fails, retry that file and leave the good ones alone. Re-running the whole batch is how you overwrite a file you already fixed.