Converting Word DOCX Files to Markdown with Python's Standard Library

Many organizations keep important content such as refund policies, onboarding guides, and SOPs in Word files, which are hard to use in LLM prompts or knowledge bases. Markdown preserves structure like headings, lists, and tables while being easier to chunk, diff, and review. The article presents a Python converter that relies only on the standard library, so it can run in CI jobs, containers, or serverless functions without installing packages. The tool reads the DOCX's internal XML to handle headings, formatting, links, nested lists, tables, images, and tracked changes. The author notes that the post is published by Appie.run, which offers its own Word conversion tools, though the script does not depend on them.