This time last summer, while I was at a cottage by the lake (The happy place for us Finns), I did what geeks often do. Instead of enjoying the serenity and disconnect from the hustle & bustle of city life, I started thinking about file formats. In particular, Markdown:

A year later, not only am I thinking about Markdown a lot, most of the files I work on during a typical day are .md rather than .pptx, .xlsx or any other Microsoft format. Ever since I embraced the Terminal UI life and started using local CLI agents like Codex and Claude Code via my Windows Terminal, Markdown has become the new default.

I even stopped doing conference presentations the old-school way and replaced opening PowerPoint by instead running a local web service to show Slidev slides. Authored and presented from Markdown files, live at events like Update Days and DynamicsMinds. Not because it would make the actual presentation operations easier for the human user. It’s mainly for the agents: so that the machine can better cross-reference source files, keep the decks updated, and perform bulk operations on the decks by just giving simple “check A and do B” commands from anywhere.

These days, there has to be a really solid reason for any mostly-text document to be in a format other than Markdown for me to even consider alternatives. It has simply become the source code for information work, thanks to how universally the file format can be used across different tools, apps and agents.

Oh, right. Except if you work inside Microsoft 365 mostly.

Compared to 2025, we can certainly find more traces of .md popping up in Microsoft products today. There is progress, but the question should be: is there commitment? Will the Office giant simply tolerate the existence of Markdown in the world or will it actively help the growing number of users to enjoy its benefits? Note: many of these “users” will be AI agents running their own tools.

First, let’s look at the history of personal computing. By that I mean what I’ve personally computed with. The 1991 386sx device that was the first PC in our family came with MS-DOS as the operating system, and at that time built-in document editing experience looked like this. Yeah, needless to say I mostly spent time in DOS getting to launch games.

Before .md, the base format for text-only notes was .txt. There was naturally an app inside every Windows computer that was associated with this file type: Notepad. It offered the basic tools for quick editing of config files on any machine (where you hadn’t yet managed to install Notepad++). There’s beauty in simplicity, and yet few people would dare to claim this could have been the center of your knowledge management universe.

In late 2025, Notepad received rudimentary Markdown support. This then quickly resulted in a new remote code execution vulnerability for specially crafted links in .md files that allowed attackers to bypass Windows security prompts. Yeah, who knew Markdown could be so dangerous — until MS started supporting them in every Windows machine?

A much more controversial addition to Notepad was of course Copilot. Having an AI-era Clippy in the most basic built-in app of Windows was one of those stories that some might have considered a joke, until it actually landed. This feature bloat has now made the modern Notepad 100 times bigger than the original classic — or at least this TinyRetroPad version built by a former Microsoft engineer to prove a point (and get content for the YouTube channel with 1M subscribers wanting to see more of it).

On the cloudy side of the Microsoft house, SharePoint and OneDrive received Markdown support in April 2026. The list of file types you can create from OneDrive got a new addition. The online experience also introduced a split preview alongside the text editor. Making the files actually editable inside the browser for quick modifications is probably the biggest win here.

For anyone with existing editors and apps that support Markdown, the feature set is not going to be revolutionary. The OneDrive team blog post says: “Stay tuned as we continue to bring more innovation to .md files and AI across OneDrive and SharePoint, so you can turn knowledge into action faster.” This may or may not mean additional features arriving in the fullness of time. I mean, it would feel strange to see a product team feature announcement that would not include such a sentence, right?

What has forced Microsoft to implement basic Markdown support now is obviously the fact that the world of AI vendors has agreed on standards that rely on .md files. Such as skills, which are now a thing you can craft for tools like Copilot Cowork, or even SharePoint. Not having a native way to author and view such files outside the AI-product specific config windows would have been quite embarrassing. No SKILL.md? No agentic AI.

In some sense, this is merely one example of how working with “code” becomes an everyday thing for people who aren’t software developers (see Democratizing code, again for more context). Non-programming team members in software projects may have already interacted with Microsoft-provided Markdown experiences in places like Azure DevOps wiki pages. What makes this activity much more commonplace these days is that the users will hardly ever start from scratch. The LLMs will have written the first draft of the .md file for the humans to look at and then potentially do lightweight changes to it.

The places where Microsoft has been less eager to light up Markdown functionality is where the humans author content. Editing a SKILL.md artifact built by a bot is one thing, but how about letting users and AI agents collaborate with just the open, no-fuss file format? That seems to be a bridge too far for M365 tools today.

Loop is the one app that feels closest to a Markdown-friendly experience, thanks to how its input controls mimic those of native .md editors. Don’t get fooled by this initial impression, though. Have you ever tried exporting Loop content somewhere outside the few places where a built-in feature for using it exists? If you did, you may as well have given up. The Loop page menu just essentially gives options to A) print to printer or B) print to PDF:

Surely there’s an API option for taking the data out? In theory, yes. In practice, if someone like Markus Wals hadn’t put together a technical guide like the one below, you could have quickly hit a wall and said “maybe we’ll just hire a cheap admin resource to do the PDF printing into our archive folder that we’ll never open again”. Raw Graph API and undocumented SharePoint Embedded container features hardly encourage people to exercise their rights to data portability.

Loop was originally announced at Ignite 2021, at the height of “Microsoft Teams as the new OS” ambitions. Then, it was again announced as a private preview at Ignite 2022. Before it ever got properly out the door, ChatGPT had happened. Microsoft pivoted to becoming The Copilot Company and so the standalone journey of Loop as a proper product got cut short before it ever hit mainstream availability. Today, the more useful lens to look at Loop is as just the backing technology for Copilot Pages and Copilot Notebooks assembled from those pages.

Good news, everyone! Microsoft seems to have finally realized that gating the Notebooks feature behind a premium license only a small fraction of their M365 users have wasn’t in their interest. So, in June the requirement for M365 Copilot user license was lifted and now Copilot Notebooks are available to all Copilot Chat (Basic) users, too. After all, if you want to get your users addicted to AI tools, it makes sense to let them create personal collections of content right inside those tools.

Now, if you ever compared the format of outputs that ChatGPT and Copilot Chat responses give you (most Copilot users probably have used both), you will have noticed they are most often just simple Markdown. Every AI chatbot these days also has the same Copy button with a similar icon that will transfer the response body text and main formatting like headings and tables to your clipboard.

The question then is: where do you paste it? It’s interesting how neither OpenAI nor Anthropic seem to have yet gone fully into the notebook management business. There must be a can of worms in all the compliance requirements that running a lightweight user content management system would require, so they’ve both mainly settled for grouping chats and context files under Projects. Microsoft, on the other hand, has been in that docs business for decades.

Sometimes that’s hard to believe, though. Especially when I find myself jumping between the various content surfaces related to Copilot & Loop & OneNote and shouting “WHERE IS MY FILE, WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO BE SO BLOODY CONFUSING, I JUST WANT TO GROUP NOTES IN FOLDERS, AAAARGGGH!!!”. I guess I’ve skipped too many of the M365 Copilot onboarding emails and only have myself to blame for not knowing how to properly adopt these new productivity tools. (I wish someone provided an honest training on how to survive with M365 Copilot. If only…)

Before going all-in with Markdown, I was a daily OneNote user for 11 years. It used to be the place where I collected both my private knowledge as well as collaborated with consulting colleagues on customer-specific projects and internal notebooks on SharePoint. In 2026, when I have attempted to combine Copilot Notebooks into this old and familiar environment, it has just resulted in more screaming and cursing. It feels too much like someone cramming a cheap NotebookLM clone inside a classic Windows desktop app and expecting it to magically deliver more value to the user.

Given how the former GM of OneNote/Notebooks recently left Microsoft and is now roasting his former products on social media comments, I consider this notes management mess to be an open secret. Although the claims about Gemini having all of this figured out aren’t very credible, at least based on how clumsy my consumer Google tools are for working between NotebookLM and Gemini chat.

“Okay, Jukka. You’ve convinced me that Markdown is the future and OneNote does not have one. How do I take my existing notes into this brave new .md world?” That’s the neat part: you don’t. At least if you are using shared OneNote notebooks via your M365 tenant account rather than personal consumer notebooks. Markdown-based notes applications like Obsidian or Joplin offer import plugins for individuals. For any broader operations, it’s back to Graph API and pushing OneNote content into HTML format first.

OneNote was the old silo. Loop is the collaborative silo. Copilot Pages may become the AI-generated memory silo. That is what my AI research agent described as “a fair framing for your newsletter” when I prompted it to look at the big picture.

There’s more at stake commercially for Microsoft in terms of .md support than just the fear of users deciding to take their documents into non-Office tools and non-MS services, thus reducing the reasons to renew (let alone upgrade) their M365 licenses. The future of software licensing has a consumption-based element and Copilot Credits are a critical new source of potential revenue.