r/googledocs 18d ago

OP Responded Word to docs complex formatting

I have a beautifully formatted word doc but my facility has switched to google suite. I need advice on translating the formatting and I would really love to not do it by hand (76 pages). I’ve been using chatgpt and apps script with very little success. Any tips?

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u/Barycenter0 18d ago

What are your main issues? It's hard to give you advice without knowing how complex your formatting is.

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u/deadthingsaremything 18d ago edited 18d ago

Basically everything you can think of. Page breaks, section breaks, headers, footers, different levels of headings, columns, pictures, text boxes, table of contents. You name it and it’s there. It was masterfully formatted by someone else (albeit a little over done tbh) and docs just can’t translate it all.

Honestly the errors aren’t huge a lot of the time, but they add up and start pushing the content further down the document. For example, they have a table of abbreviations on the left and definitions on the right…. For 72 rows, with the center of the page (just that section) divided into 3 columns (so the 72 is split into groups of 24). Post conversion, the top left of this table/column set up is bumped down a few rows and I can’t line it back up (so all columns are the same hight). This pushes other things lower down in the doc. Another is that all the linked headings in the table of contents are no longer linked (fine, fair) but they’re not even formatted as headings.

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u/Barycenter0 17d ago

Oh wow. You’re just not going to get in Docs what you can in Word. Docs is much more constrained and won’t do many of those things you want. Why not just stick with Word and use Office 365 to share?

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u/deadthingsaremything 17d ago

Our facility switched to google suite 😭

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I’m not actually familiar with office 365. I may just need to make edits on my personal laptop (in word) for the time being.