How to Use Markdown in Notion: Import, Shortcuts and Export

Notion imports Markdown directly, so there is no converter to run. In the sidebar go to Settings › Import › Text & Markdown and upload a .md or .txt file (or a .zip of them to keep folders). Headings, lists and code blocks come across; anchor links and tool-specific extensions may not. Going the other way, export a page with Export › Markdown & CSV — then run the .zip through Notion to Markdown to remove the long ID codes Notion adds to file names and links.

1. In Notion’s sidebar open Settings, then Import, then Text & Markdown.
2. Choose your .md, .markdown or .txt files. You can pick several at once.
3. To keep a folder structure, zip the folder and import the .zip: each Markdown file becomes a page.

Import works on desktop and the web, not on mobile yet. Each file can be up to 5 MB on the Free plan and 50 MB on paid plans, and Notion limits imports to about 120 files every 12 hours, so a large archive is best imported as a few smaller .zip files.

Check these after importing. Notion’s own guidance is that anchor links and non-standard Markdown extensions may not import cleanly. In practice that means a table of contents made of [text](#heading) links will not jump anywhere: replace it with Notion’s own table of contents block (type /table of contents). Notes written for another tool — Obsidian [[links]], callouts, ==highlights== — come in as the characters you typed.

Opening a Markdown file in Notion Desktop (instead of importing it) shows it with Notion’s formatting as a read-only copy.

Standard Markdown is what imports best. Before importing text from another tool:

• From ChatGPT or Claude: save the answer as a .md file (paste it into a text editor and save with the .md extension) or paste it straight into a Notion page. Tables, headings and lists are standard Markdown.
• Tidy the file first with the Markdown Formatter: it fixes mixed bullet styles, skipped heading levels and uneven tables, which are the things that most often import oddly.
• Plain notes and emails: Text to Markdown turns pasted text into headings, lists and tables before you import it.
• Remove or replace tool-specific syntax: Obsidian links, callouts and comments, wiki markup from Jira or Confluence, Discord or Slack formatting. If your source is Jira or Confluence, convert it to Markdown first with Jira to Markdown or Confluence to Markdown.
• Replace anchor links with Notion’s table of contents block after import.

Notion turns Markdown you type into blocks as you go:

One difference catches people out: in Markdown > starts a quote, but typing > in Notion starts a toggle. For a quote, type " followed by a space. A Markdown file imported with > lines is read as Markdown, so those lines arrive as quotes.

Open the page’s ⋯ menu (or the workspace settings for a whole export), choose Export, and set the format to Markdown & CSV. You can include subpages and choose whether subpages get their own folders (turn that off if Windows cannot open the .zip because of long paths).

What you get:

• Each page becomes a .md file; a full-page database becomes a .csv file with a Markdown file for each of its pages.
• Callout blocks are exported as HTML, because Markdown has no equivalent — Notion says so itself.
• File and folder names end in a long ID code (Project plan 3c4d…e9.md), and links between pages use the same encoded names.

Those codes make the files awkward in Obsidian, Git or a static site. Notion to Markdown removes them, rewrites every link and image path to match, turns callouts into GitHub-style alerts (> [!TIP]), and can merge the whole export into one document — it works in your browser, so the export is not uploaded.

• Notion → Word, PDF or Google Docs: Notion exports a page to PDF itself. For Word or Google Docs, clean the Markdown export with Notion to Markdown, then use Markdown to Word or Markdown to Google Docs.
• Notion → Obsidian: export as Markdown & CSV, clean the .zip with Notion to Markdown, and unzip it into your vault. See the Obsidian export guide for the other direction.
• Notion → HTML or a website: the cleaned Markdown works with any static-site generator; Markdown to HTML gives a standalone page.
• Notion → OneNote: clean the export as above, then paste the Markdown into Markdown to OneNote and copy the result into OneNote.
• Anything → Notion: convert to Markdown (this site has converters for Word, HTML, PDF, Jira and others), then import it as above.

Where Markdown works in Notion, and where it does not.