What file types does Wordy support? What should I use?

Documents come in a vast array of types. Wordy handles a number of common file types, namely Microsoft Word (DOC and DOCX), Microsoft PowerPoint (PPT and PPTX), Microsoft Excel (XLS and XLSX), Rich Text Format (RTF), Plain text (TXT), Adobe Acrobat (PDF), web pages (HTML), Markdown (MD) and LaTeX (TEX).

There are advantages and disadvantages of each type, which I will discuss in the related articles for the file types.

With the exception of TXT files, these file types support formatting, which includes, fonts, formatted maths and images. DOC, DOCX and RTF also support tracked changes. Not all editors work with all file formats, especially technical ones such as HTML and LaTeX.

I have a document in a format that Wordy does not support. What should I do?

First, it depends on whether the document can be converted to a format that Wordy supports. If it’s a graphics or the text is embedded in images, then it is unlikely that the document can be simply converted. For such documents, you could try using OCR software to convert it to text.

So, your main options are as follows:

1. Convert the document yourself to a format supported by Wordy.
2. Send the document to support@wordy.com for conversion.
3. Send the document to sales@wordy.com to see if they can create a job for you. This should take no more than an hour (according to the FAQ).

Open document formats are relatively easy to convert. Although they are fairly standard, they are not supported by Wordy for some reason. File types include ODT (word processing), ODS (spreadsheet) and ODP (presentation).

Graphical documents include JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, etc.

There are still other formats, such as XPS and XML. It is possible that these can be converted. They are not formats that I have much experience of.

Here are some the save options available in MS Word: 

What would you recommend?

Say you’ve produced a PDF to send out to clients. It has some fancy formatting, images and lots of text. All that formatting took as long to do if not longer than writing the text. You had to juggle things around, try out different font sizes and so on to make everything fit elegantly on the pages. Making even small changes to the text could mess everything up. A lot depends on how much your editor wants to change (and they should be able to justify every change based on dictionaries, good grammar, consistency, etc.).

A better approach ­– and one more akin to traditional publishing – is to write the words in MS Word with minimal formatting. Add the figures if they’re things like diagrams or screenshots that the text is explaining, as these may be useful for your editor. Each figure counts as a single word, so they won’t add much to the overall price. Upload the DOCX to Wordy. Once it has been edited, download the file and import it into whatever software you like to build the PDF. You should find that this process takes less work than going straight to the PDF.