Many educators experience the same issue. The response from the AI assistant appears neat on the screen, complete with bold titles and numbered lists, but once pasted into Microsoft Word, what appears instead is a series of asterisks, hashes, and dashes. The content is correct, but the formatting is broken. The problem lies neither with Word nor with the AI assistant.
What You Are Copying Is Actually Markdown
The AI assistant writes its responses in Markdown, a plain text format for structuring documents. Markdown was developed by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz and released in 2004. The rules were later standardized in the CommonMark specification, with its latest version 0.31.2 dated January 28, 2024.
In Markdown, titles are marked with one to six hash characters at the beginning of a line, and emphasis is marked with pairs of asterisks. Browsers translate those marks first, so what you see is already formatted text. Word receives the text as is. The marks that should serve as instructions also get printed as content.
Three Ways to Transfer It
Copy from the formatted answer view, not from the code box. This is the fastest route and sufficient for one-time tasks. What is copied from the formatted view generally still retains the structure of titles and lists. The most common elements to fall apart are mathematical formulas and spaces within code blocks, so those two aspects need to be checked again.
Convert with pandoc. For long texts or tasks that recur weekly, pandoc converts Markdown files to docx with a single command:
pandoc naskah.md -o naskah.docx
The input and output formats do not need to be explicitly stated, as pandoc infers them from the file extensions. If no input file is specified, the input format is assumed to be Markdown.
If the document must follow the institution's layout, first obtain the default template with pandoc -o custom-reference.docx --print-default-data-file reference.docx, change its style in Word, and then call it with the --reference-doc option. It is important to note: the content of the reference file is ignored. Only the style sheet and document properties are used, including margins, page size, headers, and footers.
Browser extensions. This route is the most frequently recommended and the one that needs to be checked before installation.
Checklist Before Installing Extensions
Google categorizes extension permissions into three risk levels, and the wording appears exactly in the installation box:
- High warning: access to all data on your computer and on the sites you visit. The scope can extend to the camera and personal files outside the browser.
- Medium warning: your data on all visited sites. This means the extension can read, request, or modify data on every page opened, including banking pages.
- Low warning: among others, the list of installed extensions, bookmarks, browsing history, tab titles and addresses, device location, and data you copy and paste.
The last item deserves emphasis for a tool that works by copying the content of answers.
Three other points are worth noting before hitting the install button.
First, optional permissions are requested after the extension is installed, and once you grant them, those permissions cannot be changed.
Second, access for the extension to sites can be narrowed after installation. Through the Extensions menu, under the option to read and change site data, there are three choices: only when the extension is clicked, only on the currently opened site, or on all sites. For a tool that is only used on one service, the first or second option is sufficient.
Third, if Enhanced Protection is enabled, Chrome warns when the extension you are about to install is not yet trusted. This trusted status is generally only achieved by new developers after several months of complying with program policies. Chrome can also disable extensions that no longer meet requirements, so a tool that works today may not necessarily last.
The practical conclusion is simple. For occasional needs, copying from the answer view is sufficient. For recurring texts that must have a uniform format, pandoc is more efficient and does not request any access to your browsing data. Extensions still make sense for daily workflows, as long as their permissions are narrowed from the start.
This topic of transferring AI results to working documents is also discussed in the AI for Educators class. If you prefer to see the explanation directly, there is a clip available here.