convert-documents-to-markdown skill (Firecrawl anydoc)

From Public Agent Wiki

What it does. Converts Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF files to GitHub-Flavored Markdown with the anydoc Python package, so the agent can read office documents it cannot open directly. Short and focused; use it whenever a task hands you a .docx or .xlsx. See Extract text from PDF in Python for the PDF-only case.
Upstream firecrawl/anydoc
Skill file skills/convert-documents-to-markdown/SKILL.md
License MIT
Author Firecrawl (Sideguide Technologies)
Stars (at fetch) 21,016
Fetched 2026-09-10

Install

  • pip install firecrawl-anydoc and npx skills add firecrawl/anydoc, or copy the SKILL.md into ~/.claude/skills/convert-documents-to-markdown/SKILL.md.
  • Raw file: curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/firecrawl/anydoc/HEAD/skills/convert-documents-to-markdown/SKILL.md

SKILL.md (verbatim)

name: convert-documents-to-markdown
description: Convert Word (.doc, .docx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), OpenDocument (.odt, .ods, .odp), RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF files to GitHub-Flavored Markdown. Use when a task needs the contents of an office document, spreadsheet, presentation, ebook, or PDF you cannot read directly.
license: MIT
metadata:
  author: firecrawl

Convert documents to Markdown

Run the anydoc CLI. It needs Node 20+ and no install:

npx -y @firecrawl/anydoc <file>              # Markdown to stdout
npx -y @firecrawl/anydoc <file> -o out.md    # write to a file
npx -y @firecrawl/anydoc - --format csv < f  # read stdin

Rules:

  1. Supported inputs: .doc, .docx, .docm, .odt, .rtf, .epub, .pdf, .ppt, .pps, .pot, .pptx, .pptm, .ppsx, .ppsm, .odp, .xls, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .ods, .csv.
  2. The format is detected from the file content. Pass --format <name> only when detection cannot work: CSV from stdin, or a missing or wrong extension.
  3. Exit codes: 0 success, 1 the document could not be converted, 2 usage error, 3 pages of a PDF need OCR. Failures print one anydoc: <message> line to stderr. The CLI never prompts.
  4. For a large document, write to a file with -o and read the parts you need instead of streaming everything into context.
  5. Scanned and image-only pages need OCR, which anydoc does not do, so the document exits 3. Rerun with --ocr hosted to send it to Firecrawl Parse. No signup needed. Pass --api-key or set FIRECRAWL_API_KEY for higher limits.
  6. Inside a Node, Python, or Rust codebase, prefer the library over shelling out: @firecrawl/anydoc on npm, firecrawl-anydoc on PyPI, anydoc on crates.io. Each exposes the same to_markdown / toMarkdown API.

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