Copy this into the editor above and convert it. It carries the marks of a real export: a title line, database properties written as plain Name: value lines, headings that stop at ###, deeply nested bullets, a percent-encoded relative image path, a link to a .csv where a database used to be, and a dollar-delimited equation. Read the notes panel after converting — the image is the one that will be listed.

# Q3 Platform Review

Status: In review
Owner: Ada Lovelace
Last edited: 2026-08-11

## Summary

The migration landed on schedule. Remaining risk sits with the reporting
pipeline, tracked below.

### What shipped

- Billing service cutover
    - Dual-write enabled 12 July
        - Rolled back once, then re-enabled
- Search reindex
- [x] Postmortem written
- [ ] Runbook updated

![Screenshot of the dashboard](Q3%20Platform%20Review%201a2b3c4d/dashboard.png)

[Reporting backlog](Reporting%20backlog%209f8e7d6c.csv)

### Capacity

Headroom is $r = 1 - \frac{u}{c}$ across the fleet.

---

> Reviewed with the platform team on 11 August.

What a Notion export turns into

The interesting cases are all about what Markdown cannot express. Notion pages carry a lot of structure that has no Markdown syntax, and the export decides what to do with each one before this converter ever sees it.

Getting a Markdown export out of Notion

Notion can export a page as PDF, HTML, or Markdown & CSV, and only the last of those becomes something you can edit in Word. Open the page, use the •••menu at the top right, choose Export, and set the format to Markdown & CSV. A single page comes down as one .md file; a page with sub-pages comes down as a .zip holding one .mdper page plus a folder of assets, and every file name carries Notion's 32-character page id on the end. Open the .md in any text editor, copy the lot, and paste it into the editor above — or drop the file straight onto the drop zone, which reads it in your browser rather than uploading it. Convert one page at a time. The 2 MB limit here is per document and a single Notion page is nowhere near it, but a whole workspace concatenated into one file can be, and the per-page files are the natural unit anyway.

Your databases are not in the file

This is the one that surprises people. In a Markdown & CSV export, every database — inline tables, boards, calendars, linked views — is written out as a separate .csv, and the .mdkeeps only a link to it. So the tidy table sitting in the middle of your Notion page is not in the Markdown you copied, and it will not be in the Word document either: you get the database's title and a link where the table used to be. There is nothing the converter can do about that, because there is no table in its input. Only a hand-built Markdown pipe table would survive, and Notion does not produce those. If the data matters, the quickest route is to open the .csv in a spreadsheet and paste it into Word as a table once the rest has converted; the tidier route is to turn the CSV into a Markdown pipe table and paste it into the editor above with the surrounding text, so the whole document stays one file. A page that lives inside a database also gets its properties written out as plain Name: value lines under the title, and those come through as ordinary paragraphs.

Images live in a folder the browser cannot reach

Notion writes images as relative paths into the sibling asset folder that came with the export, with spaces percent-encoded — something like Q3%20Platform%20Review%201a2b3c/dashboard.png. Pasting the Markdown text on its own leaves those paths pointing at a folder your browser knows nothing about, and the conversion runs inside a Web Worker, which has no page and therefore no base URL to resolve them against, so they cannot load even in principle. Each becomes an [image: …] placeholder and a line in the notes panel. Turning on Fetch remote images does not change this, and it is worth understanding why: that toggle governs http and https URLs, and a relative path is neither. To keep an image, upload it somewhere with a real URL and swap the path before converting, or convert without it and paste the picture into Word afterwards — which, for the two or three images that actually matter on most pages, is quicker.

Three heading levels, and what that does to the outline

Notion has exactly three heading levels, so an export can only ever contain #, ## and ###no matter how deeply the page is organised. Headings become Word's real Heading 1 to Heading 3 styles here, which means the outline in Word is as flat as the outline in Notion: the navigation pane and any table of contents you insert stop at three levels. Notion also writes the page title as the first # line of the file, so the document already has a title heading before your own content starts — and if you used Notion H1s inside the page as well, the finished .docx ends up with several Heading 1s. Demote them in the editor above if you want one title and a set of sections beneath it, or leave them alone if the page really is a collection of peers. Because these are genuine Word heading styles rather than bold text, References → Table of Contents in Word builds a working contents list from them in a click; the converter does not insert one for you.

Callouts, toggles, columns and colour

Markdown has no syntax for most of what makes a Notion page look like a Notion page, and the export handles each case differently. Toggles have no Markdown equivalent, so their contents are flattened into the document — nothing is lost, but nothing stays collapsed either, and a page that read as a tidy list of toggles converts into a long one. Columns and synced blocks flatten into sequential content in reading order. Coloured text, background highlights and a callout's tint have no representation at all and simply do not appear. Where the export falls back to raw HTML for a block it cannot express in Markdown, those tags arrive in Word as visible text, because this converter escapes raw HTML rather than interpreting it — a deliberate choice, since interpreting arbitrary HTML out of a pasted document is how converters grow security holes. The preview above will not show you that happening, since a preview is a browser and browsers render HTML, so the reliable check is to search the editor for < before you convert.

What comes through untouched

Plenty survives intact, and it is worth knowing which parts you do not need to check. Bulleted and numbered lists keep their nesting up to nine levels, which is the deepest OOXML defines; anything below that is flattened onto the ninth and named in the notes panel. To-do checkboxes become real Word checkbox bullets. Quotes become Word's Quote style, dividers become horizontal rules, and code blocks keep their content and their monospace, though not their colours — the converter is passed no highlighter. Equations exported as $…$ or $$…$$become native, editable Word equations with the Equations toggle on, which is the same OMML that Word's own equation editor writes, not a picture. Bold, italic, strikethrough, inline code and links all carry over as real formatting. And none of it is uploaded: the parser and the .docx writer both run in this tab, and with remote images off the converter makes no network requests at all.

Turning a Notion page into a Word document

Export a Notion page as Markdown & CSV, paste the .md here, and download an editable Word .docx — with the databases and images handled deliberately rather than lost quietly.

1. 1

   Export as Markdown & CSV

   Open the page in Notion, use the ••• menu at the top right, choose Export, and set the format to Markdown & CSV. A single page gives you one .md; a page with sub-pages gives you a .zip.

2. 2

   Paste or drop the .md in

   Open the .md in a text editor and paste the whole file into the editor on this page, or drop the file onto the drop zone. It is read in your browser, not uploaded.

3. 3

   Decide what to do about the databases

   Any database left as a separate .csv with a link in its place. Convert the CSV into a Markdown pipe table and paste it in, or add it to the Word file afterwards.

4. 4

   Handle the images

   Relative asset paths cannot resolve, so they become placeholders. Swap in real URLs and turn on Fetch remote images, or paste the two or three that matter into Word later.

5. 5

   Tidy the headings and convert

   Demote extra Heading 1s if you want a single title, turn on Equations if the page had any, then press Download .docx and read the notes panel.

Converting from somewhere else?

• ChatGPT answers to WordNumbered steps with code in them, wide comparison tables, and answers that open at Heading 3.
• GitHub README to WordBadge rows, centred HTML headers, relative paths, and anchor links that become real Word bookmarks.
• Markdown to Word, generallyThe converter without a source-specific guide around it.
• Markdown to PDFThe same Markdown, with page-break control, when the answer needs to be a PDF.