I’ve been messing around with a “plain text” workflow and I’d really like to embrace it.
However, almost everyone I work with is in the Microsoft Word world. And most of the documents I write are Word reports.
Has anyone developed a good plain text workflow that works with MS Word?
I write a lot of my stuff in Byword, Drafts, or 1Writer and then simply copy and paste into Word for sharing with Windows users (or into Pages if it’s not for sharing but I need to print it formatted in a specific way). Most of what I write requires very little formatting, though, so it’s pretty easy.
I’m ok with a fairly straightforward workflow but I’m struggling to produce something with headers, footers, footnotes, table of contents, page numbers etc. Think I’m stuck Word 
iA Writter has a very good Word exporting feature that will handle this kind of formatting. Try it out.
If your markdown editor does not support .docx export, then consider using Marked 2 to convert the document to .docx so you can finish it off in Word.
You’re not stuck with Word. There are a ton of markdown apps with good MS Word export options. iA Writer, as @ldebritto mentioned, Ulysses, Bear, and many others. Plus as @anon41602260 said, on the Mac you can always save in .md format and convert using Marked 2.
I write most of my stuff in iA Writer (and occasionally Ulysses for longer documents) and export to word when I need to work with colleagues who are used to that format.
You can also use pandoc along with Word templates to format the Word doc.
Thank you - this looks very interesting.
I didn’t know Marked did .docx export… Y’all just cost me some money! (But it goes to Brett Terpstra, so that’s a net positive for the universe.)