Word, PDF and slides to Markdown for Claude
Convert a folder of documents to Markdown and hand them to Claude.
Steps
- Press “connect” on the Documents card and choose the folder your documents are in; subfolders are included.
- Press “select export folder” and choose a separate folder beside your other exports, like
~/Documents/converted. - Keep “Markdown” ticked on the
formatrow and press “sync now”. Scanned PDF pages are read by Apple’s text recognition on your Mac. - On the MCP Server card press “start”, then connect Claude Code:
claude mcp add --transport http exporter http://localhost:8744/mcp
- Ask Claude to list and read the documents: “Summarize the contracts in Work.”
What you get
~/Documents/converted/
Work/
Quarterly report.md
Pitch deck.md
The same folder shape as your documents, each file with a short front matter (title, source, format, pages, scanned, modified), and converted again when the document changes. search ranks Apple Notes, Contacts and Messages, so Claude reaches documents with list, get_recent and read.
Pitfalls
- The export folder cannot be the documents folder or a folder inside it, and the documents folder cannot sit inside the export folder: the app does not let you pick either.
- Pages, Numbers and Keynote files are not read: export them to Word, PowerPoint, Excel or PDF first.
- On the free allowance your 10 most recently modified documents convert. A red triangle on a row gives the reason one failed.
The file types and fields are in the Documents docs, the tools in the MCP server docs.