Stop wasting 70% of your tokens in Claude.

The token math nobody shows you.

When you drop a PDF into Claude, the model does not just read the words. It processes the layout, the broken tables, the embedded images, and all the formatting metadata baked into the file. A single page can consume between 1,500 and 3,000 tokens, so a 30-page document costs you up to 90,000 tokens before you have asked a single question.

Markdown is the format Claude was trained on most heavily, so when you hand it the same content in clean Markdown instead, token usage drops by up to 70% and the answers get noticeably sharper. MarkItDown is the free Microsoft tool that does the conversion for you, and it works with almost every file type you already use.

Step 01Install the MarkItDown MCP server

Open your terminal (Terminal on Mac, PowerShell on Windows) and paste the install command. This pulls down the package Microsoft published, which includes both the converter and the MCP server that Claude will talk to.

Copy# Install MarkItDown's MCP server
pip install markitdown-mcp

That single command is the whole install. To confirm it worked, run markitdown-mcp --help and you should see the help output. If it prints, you are good for the next step.

Step 02Open the Claude Desktop config file

Claude Desktop reads its list of MCP servers from a single JSON file. Open Claude Desktop, click the menu in the top-left corner, choose Settings, then Developer, then click Edit Config. That opens the file you need, or shows you where it lives.

The path depends on your OS, in case you would rather open it manually:

Copy mac# macOS
~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

# Windows
%APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

Step 03Add MarkItDown to your config

Open the file in any text editor and paste the block below. If the file is empty or new, this is the whole content. If you already have other MCP servers in there, just add the "markitdown" entry inside the existing mcpServers object.

Copy{
  "mcpServers": {
    "markitdown": {
      "command": "markitdown-mcp",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Save the file, then fully quit Claude Desktop (Cmd+Q on Mac, right-click the tray icon and Quit on Windows) and reopen it. MCP servers only load on a fresh start, so closing the window is not enough.

How to use it from now on.

With MarkItDown connected, you have two ways to convert files inside Claude. Both work, pick the one that fits your flow.

The simple way

Drop the file into the chat and type:

CopyConvert this to markdown using markitdown, then answer my question.

Claude routes the file through MarkItDown first and uses the clean Markdown as context for everything that follows. You should feel the response come back faster and more focused.

The hands-off way

Add this one-line system prompt to a Claude Project so every file you drop in is converted automatically without you typing the instruction each time:

CopyFor every file the user uploads, call markitdown's
convert_to_markdown tool first and use the result as
the source of truth before answering anything.

Resources

• MarkItDown on GitHub — github.com/microsoft/markitdown
• MCP server package — github.com/microsoft/markitdown/tree/main/packages/markitdown-mcp
• Claude Desktop download — claude.ai/download