Perplexity Text Formatter

What is different about Perplexity's output

Perplexity is a search engine that writes, and everything it writes is annotated. Each sentence that draws on a source carries a numbered marker — [1], [2][3], occasionally [4, 5] — and the answer ends with a Sources list of titles and URLs. In the browser the markers are chips you can hover and click. Copied, they are text. The copy button gives markdown with the markers in it; the share menu's exports (PDF, Markdown, DOCX) keep them too, as does a Perplexity Page. Around the markers is ordinary assistant markdown — headings per sub-question, bold key terms, hyphen bullets, long sentences joined with em dashes — and figures quoted in whatever format each source used.

For research that is exactly right. For a memo, a proposal, a post or a spreadsheet it is a clean-up job, and the markers are the part no general tool handles.

Removing the markers, keeping the sources

The editor above has Remove citations on by default. Paste the answer and the inline markers are removed; the space before a following full stop or comma is closed; the Sources list is left alone, because removing the marks is not the same as removing the obligation to cite. The markdown symbols go in the same paste, headings become plain lines, links become readable text with the address, hidden characters from quoted web pages are stripped, and bold and bullets can be kept as Unicode characters that survive in LinkedIn, Upwork and plain email. The preferences add the rest: replace the em dashes, straighten the quotes, strip italics and code.

The destination pages convert instead of removing. Perplexity to Word and Perplexity to Google Docs strip the markers and turn the markdown into real headings and lists. Perplexity to Excel and Perplexity to Google Sheets handle the tables, where the citing happens inside the cells — $4.2bn [3] — and strip the markers before typing the numbers. For Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Notion and the chat apps, the platform formatters linked above read the same markdown; paste through this page first if you want the markers gone there too.

Citing properly after the clean-up

The Sources list is a numbered list of URLs in the order the markers used them, which makes it straightforward to cite properly in the destination: footnotes in Word or Docs, a References section, a Source column in a spreadsheet. Two habits make this reliable. Keep the list until your own citations are in, then delete it in one selection. And when the exact provenance of a figure matters, ask Perplexity to put it in the text — "according to the 2025 annual report" — rather than relying on a marker that will be stripped.

The tell, and the figures

Stripped of its markers, a Perplexity answer reads like dense, well-organised research prose — which is also how it reads as generated: every paragraph a bold term and a dash, every section the same length. The em dash remover handles the punctuation; the structure you loosen by editing. The figures deserve a separate pass. Perplexity quotes sources faithfully, so one answer can give the same quantity as $4.2bn, 4,200 million and 4.2B. Normalise them yourself; no formatter should guess which one the source meant.