How to Export Quip Documents to Markdown (2026 Guide)

Salesforce is winding Quip down. If your team still has documents there — and many enterprise teams do — you have a finite window to get that content out in a format you can actually use. Markdown is the right target: it’s portable, it’s LLM-readable, and it’s what every modern destination (Notion, Confluence, Obsidian, static site generators) can import cleanly.

This guide walks through every practical method.

Why Export Quip to Markdown?

• The product is sunsetting. Salesforce has signalled Quip is end-of-life. Move now, while the APIs still work.
• Migrate to a current tool — Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, SharePoint, or a Git-based docs repo.
• Feed AI workflows — Claude and ChatGPT need clean text. Quip’s export formats are noisy.
• Archival — you built years of institutional knowledge; don’t let it disappear when the switch flips.
• Personal portability — Markdown files live in your filesystem, searchable with ripgrep, readable forever.

Method 1: Minibase Chrome Extension (one doc at a time)

Minibase converts any Quip document to clean Markdown in one click.

What Minibase captures from Quip:

• Document title, creator, last-modified date
• Body with heading structure preserved
• Tables rendered as Markdown tables with alignment
• Inline comments captured at their anchor location, with author and timestamp
• Spreadsheet cells as table data
• Code blocks with language detection
• Linked-to Quip documents as Markdown URLs
• Embedded images as Markdown references

What Minibase strips:

• Quip UI chrome: sidebar, threads panel, toolbar
• Presence indicators and collaborator avatars

When it’s the right tool: individual docs, docs shared with you view-only, ad-hoc migration of the dozen docs you actually care about.

Method 2: Quip’s Native Export

Quip supports document-level export from the ⋯ Export menu:

• Markdown (.md) — direct Markdown export
• HTML (.html) — clean HTML, easily convertible with Pandoc
• PDF — for archival only, not for migration

Pros: free, official, handles the doc body well.

Cons: exports one doc at a time via the UI (tedious for many); doesn’t export comments alongside the body; spreadsheet cells come through as tables but lose formulas.

When it shines: one or two individual docs where you have workspace access.

Method 3: Quip Automation API

For bulk exports, Quip’s Automation API is the scripted path.

Typical flow:

1. Generate a personal access token at https://platform.quip.com/manage/tokens
2. GET /1/threads/ → list all threads (docs, spreadsheets, chats) you have access to
3. For each thread: GET /1/threads/{thread_id} → get the document’s HTML content
4. Convert HTML to Markdown with Pandoc, Turndown, or html-to-md
5. Save as .md file

Example with curl:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $QUIP_TOKEN" \
     https://platform.quip.com/1/threads/THREAD_ID \
     | jq -r '.html' \
     | pandoc -f html -t gfm -o output.md

Pros: bulk, scriptable, works on all your docs.

Cons: API rate limits, HTML-to-Markdown conversion quality depends on the converter you pick.

Method 4: Quip’s Admin Bulk Export

For enterprise Quip admins, Salesforce provides a bulk data export through the admin console:

• Path: Admin Console → Data Export
• Output: a .zip of all workspace content as HTML files + a metadata index

Then run all HTML files through a batch Markdown converter.

Pros: covers everything in one operation.

Cons: admin-only, requires a few hours to process for large workspaces, HTML quality varies.

Handling Quip’s quirks

• Spreadsheets are full Excel-grade, with formulas. Exports give you cell values, not formulas — plan accordingly.
• Comments live in a sidebar panel tied to anchors in the body. Minibase inlines them; the native export leaves them out; the API returns them as a separate endpoint (/1/threads/{id}/comments).
• Quip “Live Apps” (embedded integrations like Jira issues or Salesforce records) are rendered as links in Markdown — the live data itself doesn’t migrate.
• Shared-with-link docs may not be visible to the API token unless you’re in the workspace; Minibase captures whatever your browser can see.

A pragmatic migration plan

If you have ~50 docs that matter:

1. List the 50 docs by last-modified date (API or manual browse)
2. For each, open and click Minibase → .md file
3. Import the batch into Notion, Obsidian, or your destination of choice
4. Discard the rest

If you have 500+ docs: use the API + a batch script. Budget a weekend.

Making Quip content LLM-ready

For feeding exported docs to Claude or ChatGPT:

• Strip Quip’s proprietary data-* attributes if you’re using a direct HTML export
• Preserve heading hierarchy — LLMs navigate ## / ### structure
• Include comments attached to anchors — they often carry the most important context
• Flatten collaborator metadata — replace <user id="12345"> with the person’s name

Minibase already does all this; native export and API-based flows need post-processing.

The bottom line

Quip’s sunset is real. Every month you wait is institutional knowledge at risk. Markdown is the target format because every modern destination speaks it.

• Ad-hoc migration (1–50 docs): Minibase extension per doc — fast, free with 20 saves a month; Plus ($5.99/mo) adds AI templates, saved history & video transcription
• Bulk migration (50–500 docs): Automation API + Pandoc pipeline — one afternoon of scripting
• Full workspace archival: admin bulk export + batch converter — one-time operation
• You have content in Quip you want to feed to Claude right now: Minibase — output is already LLM-optimised

Don’t wait for the shutdown notice. Own your content in Markdown today.