Word heading checker

What this does

It reads your .docx file, lists every heading it can find, and tells you which of them are real heading styles. Anything that is only bold text gets flagged, because that is what will arrive in WordPress as an ordinary paragraph.

It converts nothing. There is no output to copy and nothing to paste.

Why a heading might not be a heading

There are two ways to make a line of text look like a heading in Word, and only one of them works.

The first is to apply a heading style. You select the text and click Heading 2 in the Styles gallery. Word records that this paragraph is a Heading 2. The information is stored in the file, separately from how it is drawn.

The second is to make the text bigger and bold. It looks the same. Word records a font size and a bold flag, and nothing else. There is no note anywhere in the file saying this is a heading, because as far as Word is concerned it is a paragraph that happens to be bold.

Most people do the second one. It is faster, it needs no knowledge of styles, and on screen the result is identical. The difference only appears later, when something other than Word reads the file.

What goes wrong when you import

Every importer, ours included, reads structure rather than appearance. A real Heading 2 becomes a heading block. A bold paragraph becomes a paragraph block that happens to contain bold text.

The consequences show up in several places at once:

• Table of contents plugins produce nothing. They build the list from heading levels. No headings means no entries.
• Your theme does not style them. Heading styling is attached to h2 and h3 elements. A bold paragraph is neither, so it gets body text styling and your carefully designed heading style never appears.
• Screen readers cannot navigate the page. People using them jump between headings the way sighted readers skim. A page with no headings has to be read from the top.
• Search engines see a flat page. Heading structure is one of the signals used to work out what a page is about and how it is organised.

None of this is visible when you look at the imported post, which is what makes it awkward. The text is bold, it sits above the section it introduces, and it looks fine. The problem is real and invisible.

How to fix it

In Word, on the Home tab:

1. Click anywhere in the line you want to change.
2. In the Styles gallery, click the heading level you want.
3. Repeat for each flagged line.

Use Heading 1 once, for the title. Use Heading 2 for main sections and Heading 3 for subsections inside them. Do not skip levels, so no Heading 4 directly under a Heading 2. This tool points out level jumps as well.

If the built-in heading styles do not look right, change the style rather than the text. Right click the heading in the Styles gallery and choose Modify. That keeps the structure and changes only the appearance, which is exactly the separation that makes the file portable.

Where this tool guesses

A short bold paragraph is usually a heading someone did not style. It is sometimes a deliberate lead-in, a term being defined, or a name at the end of a letter. This tool cannot tell the difference, so it flags rather than asserts, and the wording says a line looks like a heading rather than saying it is wrong.

The cut-off is 80 characters. Bold text longer than that is treated as emphasised body copy, because headings are rarely a full line. A partially bold paragraph is left alone entirely.

Read the list as a set of suggestions about your own document, not a report card. You are the one who knows which lines were meant to be headings.

What the checker looks at

It reads two things from the file and nothing else.

Paragraph styles. Every paragraph in a .docx carries a style name. Heading 1 through Heading 6 are recognised, whatever they have been made to look like. A Heading 2 restyled to look small and grey is still a Heading 2, and still arrives as one.

Character formatting. For paragraphs that are not headings, it checks whether the whole paragraph is bold and how long it is. Both have to hold. A sentence with three bold words in the middle is ordinary emphasis and is left alone.

It does not look at font size, colour, alignment or spacing. Those vary far too much between documents to mean anything on their own, and using them would flag a great deal of ordinary text.

Heading levels, and why the order matters

Beyond whether a heading is real, there is the question of whether the levels make sense. Headings describe a hierarchy: an H3 belongs inside the H2 above it, the way a subsection belongs inside a section.

Skipping a level breaks that. An H4 directly under an H2 says there is an H3 somewhere that is missing. Nothing visible goes wrong, but anything building an outline from your page has to guess, and screen reader users navigating by heading level get a structure that does not match what they see.

The checker points out the first level jump it finds rather than every one. A document with a systematic problem would otherwise produce a warning against almost every heading, which is noise rather than information.

It also mentions a missing Heading 1, or more than one. Neither is an error. Most pages use a single Heading 1 as the title of the piece and Heading 2 for the sections beneath it, and a document that does something else is usually doing it by accident.

Fixing a whole document quickly

If a long document has the same problem throughout, fixing it line by line is slow. Two faster routes in Word:

1. Repeat the last action. Fix one heading properly, then select the next one and press Ctrl and Y, or Command and Y on a Mac.
2. Find and Replace with formatting. Open Find and Replace, click More, then Format, then Font, and set Bold. Leave both text boxes empty. In the Replace field set the style to Heading 2. That converts every bold paragraph in one pass. Check the result afterwards, because it will also catch bold text you meant to keep.

The second is faster and blunter. On a document with a hundred headings it is worth the checking. On one with five it is not.

Why this tool converts nothing

It would be straightforward to make this convert the document as well. It deliberately does not, for a reason worth stating plainly: a tool that tells you your document has a problem and then quietly works around it teaches you nothing, and the next fifty documents will have the same problem.

Fixing the headings in Word fixes them everywhere. In the PDF you export, in the navigation pane, in anything else you ever do with that file. Working around them fixes one import.