#1

What I’m trying to do

I like to write all papers in Obsidian and then copy/paste into MS Word. Is there a way to have Word recognize the markdown formatting?

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#2

I don’t have MS Word to try it in, but I assume you can select text in preview mode and paste it.

I made a video on how to achieve something similar for Gmail

Hope that helps!

#3

There are a couple of different ways depending on what kind of markdown formatting you’re working with. For simple stuff, you can copy the preview. If you have a bunch of footnotes (which never seem to copy smoothly) I’ve heard good things about pandoc. If pandoc seems like too much, you can check out this plugin for Word that lets Word recognize markdown.

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#4

Yeah, great tips @EleanorKonik pandoc is the most popular and best format converter there is, but it’s tricky to set up. I wasn’t aware of that MS Word plugin, that could solve it, if copy/paste from preview mode doesn’t work.

#5

What an idiot! I don’t know why it never occurred to me to copy from preview mode! I never use preview mode, so it didn’t occur to me. I just have to switch to a light mode first. Trying the plugin, thank you EleanorKonik. Keep up the fun YouTubes Santi.

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#6

I totally get you, I don’t use preview mode either and I don’t think this trick is that obvious don’t worry :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Happy to know it worked for you! Thanks for the support, feel free to message me if you ever need any help!

#7

Another option that’s easier than Pandoc is to open the file in a Markdown editor that can export to Word format, like iA Writer or Ulysses. The advantage over copy-paste is that you can set a custom template without having to change the settings on your whole vault. In iA you have to use HTML and CSS to make custom templates. Ulysses gives you some nice menus to customize the templates, but may alter the Markdown in your file. (You seem happy with copy-paste — I’m just mentioning these for future readers.)

#8

I had to export from Obsidian to MS Word today (Academia runs on MS Word) and copy pasting from preview mode (after switching to light theme) still left me with a number of weird fixes needed - and some figures did not come through the clipboard.

Installing pandoc or buying a MS Word plug in (or working in Ulysses) are nice options to know about but feel like overkill for a functionality (like export to pdf) that seems should be part of Obsidian.

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#9

The pandoc plugin works great and covers several different formats of the documents.