Preparing a Word File

Last updated on 2024-12-23

Overview

MS Word documents must meet specific requirements to allow them to be tagged correctly. In this chapter, you can find the most important requirements that Word documents must meet to be tagged.

Requirements for Word Documents

To allow MS Word documents to be tagged correctly, the following prerequisites must be fulfilled:

  • For MS Word documents, it is necessary to use styles (Heading 1, Heading 2 etc.) to structure the documents. To change the structure level of styles, right-click the paragraph and choose Paragraph and then Outline Level. 
  • All tables provided with tags must be normal Word tables (no embedded Excel tables etc.).
  • It is not possible to tag values of a table included as an image in a document.
  • Shapes and images anchored before or after a text are positioned at the anchor position. This can result in a different layout when converting to XHTML.
  • Images and shapes inserted as embedded Office objects (e. g. diagrams from MS PowerPoint or MS Excel) cannot be converted into XHTML. Such images must be converted into images, e. g. by creating and inserting a screenshot.
  • The conversion of two-column text layouts from MS Word into XHTML is not supported.