How do I turn a Markdown table into a Word table?

A Markdown table is plain text:

| Task      | Owner | Due    |
| --------- | ----- | ------ |
| Draft     | Ada   | 3 Nov  |
| **Review**| Bob   | 10 Nov |

A Markdown renderer turns that into a grid. Word has no Markdown renderer, so pasting the text gives you exactly what is on the clipboard: four paragraphs of characters, with the bars, the dashes and any ** markers showing. The same thing happens to headings and bold text, which is covered in why pasted AI text shows ** and ## in Word.

Word does have a tool for turning delimited text into a table, Convert Text to Table, and it accepts any single character as a separator. The catch is that Markdown wraps every row in pipes and adds a row of dashes, both of which Word treats as data. The three routes below deal with that in different ways:

1. Convert the whole Markdown document to .docx and let the converter build the table.
2. Turn the pipes into tabs first, then use Convert Text to Table.
3. Use Convert Text to Table on the pipes directly and clean up afterwards.

Markdown to Word reads the Markdown and writes a Word file in your browser. Paste the whole document, tables and all, and download the .docx. Each pipe table becomes a real Word table, with headings, lists and the rest of the text converted around it. To move the table into an existing document, open the file, click inside the table, select it and copy.

What the table contains:

• One Word table row per Markdown row, one cell per value, with thin single borders on every cell.
• Bold, italic, inline code and links inside cells are converted, so **Review** becomes bold text, not asterisks.
• The dashes row is removed.

Where it falls short, so you can check:

• Rows must start and end with a pipe. Markdown allows tables without the outer pipes (Task | Owner | Due). The Word export does not recognise those and leaves them as text. Add the outer pipes, or use route 2.
• The header row is not styled. It is an ordinary first row: select it and make it bold, or apply a table style from the Table Design tab.
• Column alignment is ignored. The colons in ---: are dropped, so right-aligned number columns come out left-aligned.
• Escaped pipes split. A \| inside a cell is treated as a cell boundary in the Word export, which adds a cell to that row. Replace it with another character first.
• No merged cells or images. Markdown cannot merge cells, and an image becomes its alt text.

Copy instead of Download. The converter's Copy button puts a formatted version on the clipboard as well as the text, and pasting that into Word usually gives you a table directly, without a file. Check the borders and widths after pasting, since Word decides how pasted web-style tables look. For a document with several tables, Download is the more dependable of the two.

Microsoft's own advice for Convert Text to Table is to use tabs as the separator when the text contains commas. Tabs are also the separator that leaves nothing behind, so this route gives the cleanest Word table.

1. Paste the table into Remove Markdown Formatting. It drops the dashes row, removes the outer pipes, joins the cells with tab characters and strips **, backticks and link syntax inside the cells. Copy the result.
2. In Word, paste with Keep Text Only (press Ctrl+V, then Ctrl, then T) so each row lands as a plain paragraph with tabs inside it.
3. Click Show/Hide ¶ on the Home tab. You should see a tab arrow between the values and a ¶ at the end of each row.
4. Select the rows and click Insert > Table > Convert Text to Table.
5. Under Separate text at, choose Tabs. Check that Number of columns matches your table.
6. Under AutoFit behavior, choose AutoFit to contents for a compact table or AutoFit to window for full width, then click OK.

Two things to watch. This route needs the outer pipes too: a table written without them is not converted to tabs. And an escaped \| stays in the cell as \|, so search for it afterwards.

Without any other tool, Word can still split on the pipe character:

1. Paste the Markdown table and delete the row of dashes.
2. Select the remaining rows and click Insert > Table > Convert Text to Table.
3. Under Separate text at, choose Other and type |.
4. Check Number of columns. Because each row starts and ends with a pipe, Word counts an empty column at each edge, so a three-column table needs five.
5. Click OK, then delete the empty first and last columns (select a column, right-click, Delete Columns).

The cells keep the padding spaces and any Markdown inside them, so **Review** still shows asterisks. Clean those with Find and Replace, searching for ** with Use wildcards unticked.

Whichever route you used, a few touches make the table look like it was built in Word:

• Header row. Make the first row bold, or pick a style on the Table Design tab that formats the header row.
• Number alignment. Right-align columns of figures; none of the routes keep Markdown's alignment colons.
• Column widths. Drag the column borders, or use AutoFit, if a long value stretches one column.
• From a spreadsheet instead. If the table is going to be edited as data, convert it with Markdown Table to Excel, open the file in Excel, and copy the range into Word. Word pastes Excel data as a table.

To turn a Word table back into Markdown later, Word to Markdown converts rich text copied from Word, tables included.

Sources for the Word steps: Microsoft Support, Convert text to a table or a table to text and Control the formatting when you paste text. Menu names are for Word for Microsoft 365, 2024 and 2021 on Windows, checked October 2026.