PDF to Markdown

Convert PDFs and Office files (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) into clean Markdown with Microsoft's markitdown, from inside Claude Code.

What it does

• Converts PDF, Word (.docx), PowerPoint (.pptx) and Excel (.xlsx) files to Markdown with Microsoft markitdown.
• Keeps headings, lists and tables, which plain text extraction loses.
• Tells you when a PDF is a scan with no text layer, instead of returning an empty file. It does not do OCR.

Needs Python. The skill installs markitdown on first use: pip install "markitdown[pdf,docx,pptx,xlsx]".

Use

Ask Claude: "convert this PDF to markdown", "extract the tables from this spreadsheet" or "turn these slides into notes".

Install

Download this skill and copy the pdf-to-markdown folder to .claude/skills/pdf-to-markdown/ in your project, or to ~/.claude/skills/pdf-to-markdown/ to use it in every project. Claude Code finds it on its own; you can also call it with /pdf-to-markdown.

Source: endorphin-ai/hasbrains-agent-kit. License: MIT.