You finished the manuscript in Word. Now you need it in something built for actual book production — proper chapter breaks, exportable EPUB and print PDF, a real table of contents. The moment you try to import a Word document into book software, though, you find out that ".docx" is not a universal translator. Some things survive the trip perfectly. Others need a nudge. A few just don't make it. Knowing which is which before you hit "import" saves you an afternoon of chasing down missing footnotes and mangled tables.

What converts cleanly, almost every time

Plain text and standard Word styles are the easiest thing any import tool will ever handle, because they're the most predictable part of a .docx file.

  1. Body paragraphs. Regular text, indentation, and line breaks map over without drama.
  2. Bold, italic, and underline. Inline character formatting is stored as simple tags in the file and almost always survives intact.
  3. Heading styles used as headings. If you typed your chapter titles using Word's "Heading 1" style (not just a bigger, bolded font), Pendrilo will read those as chapter breaks and build your chapter list automatically. This is the single most repeated piece of formatting advice for self-published authors, and it's worth repeating again here: it's the difference between a book that imports into 30 clean chapters and one that imports as a single 90,000-word blob you then have to chop up by hand.
  4. Basic ordered and unordered lists. Numbered and bulleted lists generally translate, though nested sub-lists can shift indentation slightly.

The gray zone: formatting that needs a second look

Some formatting technically survives the import but doesn't behave the way you expect, because Word and book-typesetting software think about layout differently.

Manual page breaks

If you inserted a page break (Ctrl+Enter) to force a new chapter onto a fresh page instead of using a heading style, that break usually imports as a break inside the same chapter, not a new chapter. It looks fine in Word. It looks wrong in the imported file. Always use heading styles for chapter starts and let the software's theme handle "start on a new page" automatically.

Scene breaks

Authors mark scene breaks a dozen different ways: a centered "***", three centered pound signs, an empty line, a small image of a symbol. Text-based breaks (asterisks, dashes) usually import as plain text. Pendrilo can convert these to its built-in scene-break element, but you'll want to review them after import so they render consistently — as a proper dinkus rather than three stray characters sitting in a paragraph.

Custom paragraph styles

If you built your own styles in Word — a "Letter" style for in-story correspondence, a "Verse" style for poetry — the text content imports fine, but the custom styling behind it often doesn't. Expect to reapply special formatting to anything that isn't standard body text. Pendrilo offers text features (block quotations, verse blocks, written notes) that let you mark up your prose after import so it renders as you intended.

Tabs and spaces used for indentation

If you indented paragraphs by hammering the space bar or tab key instead of using Word's paragraph-indent setting, that indentation can import as literal characters sitting in your text. It won't break anything, but it will look odd once real typesetting is applied on top of it, and you'll want to clean it up.

What almost never makes the trip

This is the part authors most need to hear before they migrate a finished manuscript, because it changes what you back up and how you plan the move.

  1. Footnotes and endnotes. Word's native footnote/endnote system is a proprietary structure that doesn't translate cleanly into book software. Pendrilo does not import them. If your manuscript relies on footnotes — academic work, annotated fiction, a nonfiction title with sourcing — plan to reinsert them manually after import. Pendrilo supports footnotes with optional in-text citations once they're in the app, but the import itself won't bring them over.
  2. Tables. Word tables generally do not survive an import into book-formatting software at all, or they come through as a jumble of tab-separated text with no grid. If your manuscript has a table (a family tree, a data table in a nonfiction book, a comparison chart), plan to rebuild it manually after import or convert it to an image beforehand.
  3. Embedded images. Pictures embedded in a .docx are stored in a different way than the manuscript text, and import tools are built to bring over text and structure, not media. Expect to re-add images separately once your text is in. Pendrilo lets you upload images as figures with captions after import.
  4. Headers, footers, and page numbers. These are Word-page-layout features, not manuscript content, and they don't carry meaning outside a Word document. Book software builds headers, footers, and page numbers itself, based on your chosen theme — so losing Word's version isn't actually a loss, it's just a different system taking over.
  5. Tracked changes and comments. Resolve or accept every tracked change and clear out comment bubbles before you import. Most tools either ignore this markup or, worse, import the deleted text as if it were still live. Pendrilo has its own comment system once you're inside the app.
  6. Exact fonts and character spacing. The specific typeface, kerning, and font size you used in Word gets replaced by whatever theme you apply in the new software. This is normal and expected — you're not preserving a manuscript's look, you're building a book's look, and that's a separate step.

A pre-import checklist that saves real time

Fifteen minutes of cleanup in Word before you import will save you an hour of cleanup after.

  1. Apply "Heading 1" (or your chosen heading style) to every chapter title, and only chapter titles. Don't reuse it for anything else, like section dividers within a chapter.
  2. Delete manual page breaks placed at chapter starts — let the heading style do that job.
  3. Accept or reject all tracked changes, and delete all comments.
  4. Pull out any tables and note where they belong; you'll rebuild them after import.
  5. Export embedded images separately (or note their original file names and locations) so you can re-add them once your text is in.
  6. List out every footnote and its location if your book uses them, so you can verify and re-add them after import.
  7. Replace space-bar or tab-key indents with an actual paragraph-indent setting, or just strip them — most book software applies its own indent automatically.

After the import: what to check first

Once the file is in, don't start proofreading page one. Check structure first. Open the chapter list and count it against your original document's table of contents. A mismatch here usually means a heading got applied inconsistently somewhere in the middle of the manuscript — a common culprit is a chapter title that was typed in Heading 2 by mistake, or one that was bolded instead of styled. Pendrilo builds your chapter list automatically from heading styles, so a miscount almost always points to an inconsistent heading application in the original file.

Next, scan for any special formatting that imported as plain text rather than a proper element. Scene breaks, if they came through as plain asterisks or dashes, should be swapped for Pendrilo's built-in scene-break style so they render consistently across EPUB and print. Text features like quotations, verse blocks, and written notes can be applied after import to mark up prose that was hand-formatted in Word, so the appearance flows from your theme rather than sitting as frozen formatting.

Front and back matter is worth a dedicated look too. Copyright pages, dedications, and "also by" pages often get typed straight into the manuscript in Word, which means they'll import as regular chapters unless you flag them correctly in the chapter sidebar. If you're setting these up fresh, Pendrilo offers matter templates so you can save a front-matter or back-matter layout once and reuse it across every book in your catalog, rather than rebuilding a copyright page from scratch each time.

When it's worth just rebuilding instead of importing

If your manuscript is heavy on tables, has more than a handful of images placed mid-chapter, or uses a lot of custom typographic tricks, sometimes the faster path is importing the plain text and rebuilding the special elements directly in the new software rather than fighting an import to preserve something it was never built to carry. Novels with occasional scene breaks and the odd footnote import with very little friction. A recipe book with forty tables and photos on every page is a different job entirely, and treating it like a straightforward import will cost you more time than starting the layout fresh.

Either way, back up your original .docx before you touch anything — keep it untouched as your source of truth in case an import needs a second attempt. If you want to see how your manuscript's word count translates into estimated page count before you commit to a layout, the free words-to-pages estimator at Pendrilo's tools page is a quick sanity check. And if you're ready to move a finished manuscript into a dedicated writing and formatting workspace, you can create a free account and run the import yourself before deciding on anything.