How to sync your Markdown docs to Microsoft Loop and vice versa

TL;DR - No sync! It's copy and paste, with Base64 encoding for images.

Over the last months, there was an attempt by Microsoft to give plain-text Markdown formatting a bit of an entryway into its walled garden of Word, SharePoint and MS Loop.

In Word Online, I can use # Heading to create a real document outline. MS Loop, the Notion clone and better-looking version of OneNote, understands Markdown blocks as well. And last but not least, opening a .md file in SharePoint now presents the file in a nice split-view editor.

For a developer thrown into the cold '90s office environment, it's a real PITA. An Obsidian vault synced with OneNote to a SharePoint Library is certainly possible, but in order to comply with our team's use of Loop for documentation, it gets tricky. That's especially relevant since Copilot Pages, Microsoft's editable canvas for Copilot responses, can be edited in Loop as well. Anyways, the goal is to provide the detailed Markdown documentation (that I totally wrote myself) in MS Loop.

Just to make this clear: It's not possible! MS Loop is not a Markdown editor and Obsidian is not an MS Loop interface!

MS Loop is based on the Fluid Framework and even if it's open source, I'm not going to spend a single token on trying to build some MS Loop to Markdown sync.

My choice is good old copy and paste, with browser and Obsidian extensions to get there.

Obsidian Markdown (Plain Text) to MS Loop¶

Use Ctrl+Shift+V (⌘+Shift+V on macOS) to paste Markdown syntax into Loop and convert it to rich text. Code blocks are sometimes messed up but overall, it works.

Obsidian Markdown (Plain Text and Images) to MS Loop¶

This is where it gets tricky. If you have Markdown like the following, you have to deal with the image separately and copy and paste it into Loop.

## Obsidian Markdown (Plain Text and Images) to MS Loop

This is where it gets tricky.

![](assets/obsidian-loop/Pasted%20Image.png)

The trick is to "bake" the images into the Markdown document via Base64. For that, use the Obsidian Image Baker plugin.

Obsidian Image Baker is an Obsidian plugin that bakes images into your notes as self-contained Base64 embeds — and un-bakes them back into regular files whenever you want.

Right-click the image and select "Embed image..." or use Image Baker in the command palette, and the Markdown becomes:

## Obsidian Markdown (Plain Text and Images) to MS Loop

This is where it gets tricky.

![assets/obsidian-loop/Pasted%20Image.png](data:image/png;base64,<base64>)

This gives you a text file with a bloated Base64 string that you can copy and paste into MS Loop.

MS Loop (Text and Images) to Obsidian Markdown¶

Here you can use copy and paste as well. Copy all the Loop content and paste it into Obsidian.

Alternatively, there is a browser extension Loop to Markdown Converter that allows you to download single pages or whole workspaces as Markdown.

The extension says all processing happens locally in the browser and no data is sent to external servers, but it's still a third-party browser extension that reads your Loop pages. Images are Base64 encoded in the text, so in Obsidian you would want to Extract image to file and that's it.

What about Word?¶

Generally, you can use something like Pandoc or any of the online tools. But that creates so much friction and new file versions, and it's not part of the editing process. Just stay away from it if possible.