What Obsidian gives Word documents that Word can't
Backlinks. Tags. Graph view. Local-first storage. Plugins. The same content that sat as a static .docx for years becomes the anchor of an interconnected knowledge graph the moment it's in the vault. Old project plans link to current ones; old research surfaces in the graph next to new threads on the same topic; tags pull in related documents you'd forgotten you wrote.
Convert each Word document to Markdown via Word to Markdown, save into the vault, add frontmatter (---\ntags: [research, q3-2026]\n---) and any [[wiki-links]] you want to thread into existing notes. The document becomes a first-class vault citizen.
Honest workflow note: one at a time vs batch migration
The web tool converts one document at a time — the right surface for progressive migration as you re-read old documents and decide which to bring into the vault. For true mass migration of hundreds or thousands of Word files at once, run Pandoc locally: for f in *.docx; do pandoc "$f" -o "${f%.docx}.md"; done in a shell loop produces the same Markdown output for free. Both paths feed the same vault; pick the surface that matches your migration cadence.
For multi-modal vaults: pair with PDF for Obsidian, URL for Obsidian, Audio for Obsidian, and Video for Obsidian. Every source modality reaches the vault as the same kind of structured Markdown.