Office formats
Word, Excel and PowerPoint — returned as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
These are the formats everybody claims to handle and the ones where the output most often comes back subtly wrong: a style lost, a formula replaced by its result, a slide that no longer fits its own text.
DOCX, XLSX, PPTX and the older DOC, XLS and PPT formats.
What is kept, format by format
Being specific, because 'preserves formatting' is the most over-used phrase in this category.
Word — styles and structure
Heading levels, paragraph and character styles, numbering, headers and footers, page and section breaks, footnotes, tables and their structure.
Excel — formulas stay formulas
Cell structure, sheet layout, formulas, number and date formats. A formula is not replaced by the value it currently evaluates to.
PowerPoint — slide geometry
Slide layouts, placeholder positions, master styles, speaker notes, chart data references, and text that has to reflow inside its box rather than escape it.
Legacy formats
DOC, XLS and PPT are handled through conversion. These are older formats and conversion is not lossless by nature, so a legacy file is worth testing as a sample rather than assuming.
The three failures we hear about most
All three are visible the moment someone opens the file, which is the worst possible moment to find them.
The formula problem: an Excel file comes back with formulas flattened into the numbers they happened to produce. The document looks fine and is now unusable as a working spreadsheet.
The style problem: paragraph styles are lost and the document inherits whatever the translator's environment had. It looks approximately right and is now inconsistent with every other document in the set.
The overflow problem: translated text is longer than the source and escapes its container — a text box, a table cell, a slide placeholder. Nothing in a text-level check notices this.
How an Office file is processed
The same path for every document, whatever the format.
- 01
Inspect
The file is examined before anything is translated — structure, content types, whether there are embedded objects or images carrying text.
- 02
Translate with your terminology
Content is translated with your glossary applied during translation. Up to 2000 terms per glossary, TXT, CSV or XLSX.
- 03
Write back in place
Translated text goes into the original document rather than into a rebuilt one, which is what keeps styles and formulas intact.
- 04
Check, then check visually
A separate model reviews the content, then the rendered output is compared against the source so overflow and layout failures are caught before the file reaches you.
Office format questions
Are Excel formulas preserved?
Yes. Structure and formulas stay in place — a formula is not replaced by the value it currently produces.
What happens to PowerPoint layouts?
Slide layouts, placeholder positions and master styles are kept. Text that grows in translation reflows inside its box rather than escaping it, and the rendered result is checked before delivery.
Do you handle .doc, .xls and .ppt?
Yes, through conversion. These are older formats and conversion is not lossless by nature, so we would suggest testing a legacy file as a sample rather than assuming it will behave like the modern format.
What about embedded images with text in them?
Text inside an embedded image is not part of the document's text layer. It can be handled through the image path, but tell us if your files rely on it so we can scope it properly.
Can you apply our glossary to a Word file?
Yes — TXT, CSV or XLSX, up to 2000 terms per glossary, applied during translation rather than as a correction afterwards.
Is there a file size limit?
500 MB per file, 50 files per submission, 1000 pages per PDF. Those are the limits our production system enforces.
Send us a spreadsheet with formulas in it.
That is the file that shows whether write-back actually works. If the formulas survive, the rest usually does too.
- Real file
- Returned finished
- You check the formulas yourself