Converting documents to different formats

We installed Pandoc, then shifted to writing a bunch of plain text. Now we’re back to using Pandoc. The purpose of installing Pandoc is that it’s a tool we can use to take the plain text document that we’re writing and convert it into a format that’s easier to share with other people who are expecting things like Word or PDF documents.

We’re going to use Pandoc to convert a plain text Markdown-formatted document into a Word-formatted document. We’re going to have to do a little bit of work in our Terminal, so if you closed your terminal, you should open it up again like you did before when [verifying that Pandoc is installed].

First: Save your plain text Markdown-formatted document somewhere. I’m going to recommend that (for now!) you save this file to your Desktop folder.

Make sure that you save your file with a name that has a .md extension. This isn’t super important, but it makes Pandoc’s job a little easier when deciding what kind of file it’s converting, and it makes opening the Markdown file with VS Code a little bit easier.

Once you’ve saved your file, switch to your terminal, then type:

cd Desktop

Congratulations 🎉! You just ran your second terminal command (Second?! Yeah! you ran pandoc earlier!).

Converting to Word

OK, but now we need to do the hard work of actually converting our Markdown-formatted document to a Word file. It’s actually straightforward:

pandoc "your_file.md" -o "your_file.docx"

You should replace your_file.md with whatever your file’s name is, and you should replace your_file.docx with whatever you want the Word-formatted document to be named.

If everything’s working, Pandoc won’t print out anything, but you should be able to look at your desktop and see two files: your Markdown-formatted plain text file and a Word-formatted .docx file 🎉!

Open up the Word-formatted file with Microsoft Word, Office 365, or Google Docs and take a look.

If Pandoc did print something out, a few things could be wrong:

• You might not have saved your file to your Desktop folder. Try saving the document in VS Code again (use File → Save as…) and make sure to save it to your Desktop folder.
• You might not have saved your file with a .md extension. Try saving the document in VS Code again (use File → Save as…) and make sure that when you enter a name for your file that the name of the file ends with .md.
• Your terminal might not be in the Desktop directory when you ran the pandoc command. Try entering cd Desktop again. If nothing gets printed out, then you should be in your Desktop folder. If something does get printed out, then you can’t access your Desktop folder from where you are right now. Your terminal could be anywhere right now, so your best course of action would be to ask for help!