One of the services I provide as a freelance project manager is reviewing project outputs for accuracy and styling. If the output of a project is a Word document then we want it to be as good as possible.

One of the characteristics of British business is that almost no-one receives any IT training and very few people know how to use Styles in Microsoft Word. Properly used, they create beautiful documents that are easy to navigate and read. This is because Headings and other styles are “semantic mark-up” that provide additional information about the content. This mark-up is particularly important for blind and partially sighted users because it is visible to assistive software. Organisations that take accessibility compliance seriously should ensure that all their documents are styled correctly.

My job, and the job of users, is about to be made much easier by Microsoft’s new Word Designer tool. Word Designer will be powered by AI like PowerPoint Designer. Less “Terminator” and more “correct termination of bulleted sentences”.