APA Paper Formatter (APA 7 Layout for Your Own Word File)

About the APA Paper Formatter (APA 7 Layout for Your Own Word File)

Open the paper you have already written, choose student or professional, and get it back as a .docx laid out the way APA Style 7 asks: 1-inch margins, double spacing with no extra space between paragraphs, one approved font throughout, left-aligned text with a 0.5-inch first-line indent, the five heading levels in their own shapes, section labels centred and bold on a new page, table and figure captions in their places, a page number in the top right of every page (with a running head for a professional paper) and a reference list with a 0.5-inch hanging indent, in A-Z order.

Your words are never touched. The tool writes layout properties only — margins, spacing, indents, alignment, the font, bold and italics on headings and captions, the page header — so your sentences, citations, tables, images, footnotes and tracked changes come back exactly as you wrote them. What it cannot fix it tells you about instead: DOIs written in an older form or missing from a journal article, "et al." used for a two-author work or left out of a three-author citation, "&" and "and" the wrong way round, a cited work with no reference entry, numbered headings, a list labelled "Bibliography".

Everything happens in this browser. The file is opened and changed on your device, which matters for an unpublished thesis: nothing is uploaded, and nothing is kept after you close the page.

Common uses

• Handing in a course paper that has to be in APA 7 without formatting it by hand.
• Putting a finished thesis chapter into APA layout without uploading it anywhere.
• Finding the citation and DOI problems a marker will notice, before you hand the paper in.
• Turning a paper written in someone else’s template back into plain APA.

What it changes

• Page: 1-inch margins on every side; a page number in the top right of every page, starting at 1 on the title page; for a professional paper the running head in capitals, up to 50 characters, on the left of the same line.
• Text: one APA font throughout (any font or size set on individual words or on the document’s own styles is removed; footnotes keep their default size and symbol characters their font); double spacing everywhere, with no space before or after paragraphs; left-aligned with a ragged right margin; a 0.5-inch first-line indent on body paragraphs, while list items keep the indentation of their list.
• Headings: level 1 centred bold; level 2 flush left bold; level 3 flush left bold italic; levels 4 and 5 indented 0.5 inch, bold and bold italic. Word’s own heading styles are updated too, so the style gallery agrees with the paper.
• Sections: “Abstract”, “References”, “Footnotes”, “Tables”, “Figures” and “Appendix” centred, bold and starting on a new page (a manual page break you put before one is replaced, so no blank page appears); the abstract paragraph flush left and the keywords line under it indented.
• Your own title page: when the paper already starts with one (centred lines before a page break), its lines stay centred and are only double-spaced.
• References: a 0.5-inch hanging indent, double spacing, no extra space between entries, and A-Z order letter by letter through the authors’ names, then by year (you can switch the ordering off).
• Tables and figures: the number (“Table 1”) flush left and bold, the title under it flush left and italic, a “Note.” line flush left.
• Block quotations: indented 0.5 inch with no first-line indent.

What it never changes

Not one word. The tool edits layout properties inside the file; it does not write, rewrite, shorten, translate or correct anything, and it adds no sentence of its own. Your citations, your reference entries, your tables, your images, your footnotes, your comments and any tracked changes stay as they are. The one thing it moves is the order of whole reference entries when you ask for A-Z order — and the entries themselves are untouched. The title page, if you ask for one, is built only from the details you type.

The checks it reports

The checks are the things a formatter must not decide for you:

• DOIs: an entry that writes a DOI as “doi:10.…” or through dx.doi.org (APA 7 asks for https://doi.org/…), a journal article with no DOI at all, and “Retrieved from” before a link.
• “et al.”: a citation that spells out three or more surnames, “et. al.” with the full stop in the wrong place, and “X et al.” where the reference entry has only one or two authors.
• Citations: “and” inside brackets or “&” in a sentence, a citation whose year does not match its entry, and a cited work with no entry in the reference list.
• Reference list: a list labelled “Bibliography” or “Works Cited”, entries out of A-Z order (when you leave the ordering off, or a reference manager keeps the list), and citations with no list at all.
• Headings: a numbered heading, an “Introduction” heading at the start, a level skipped, and a section with only one subsection.

Each check names the rule and links to the page at apastyle.apa.org that states it. To write a citation or a reference entry from scratch, use the APA Citation Generator; the Reference List Checker looks at a list on its own.

Student and professional papers

A student title page carries the title (bold, centred, three to four lines down), the author names, the department and institution, the course number and name, the instructor and the due date, each on its own double-spaced line; the page header is the page number only. A professional title page carries the title, the authors, the affiliations and an author note, and its page header adds the running head. Student papers do not carry a running head unless the instructor asks for one, and APA 7 has no “Running head:” label at all — if your paper has one, the tool says so.

Where the rules come from

Every rule above is taken from the publisher’s own guidance at apastyle.apa.org, under Style and Grammar Guidelines → Paper Format and References: margins (Publication Manual 2.22), line spacing (2.21), font (2.19), paragraph alignment and indentation (2.23, 2.24), headings (2.26, 2.27), page header (2.18), title page setup (2.3), order of pages (2.17), reference list setup (2.12), DOIs and URLs (9.34–9.36) and the author–date citation system (8.17). APA Style and APA are trademarks of the American Psychological Association, which does not endorse this tool.

Limitations

• Only .docx files (Word 2007 and later, Google Docs and LibreOffice exports). A .doc, .pages or .odt file has to be saved as .docx first.
• The tool reads headings from the heading styles in your file. Text that only looks like a heading because it is bold stays body text — apply Heading 1 to 5 in your editor first.
• A heading at level 4 or 5 should run into its paragraph; the tool indents and bolds it but cannot join two paragraphs into one.
• The keywords line under an abstract is left exactly as you typed it.
• A-Z ordering goes letter by letter through the authors’ names, then the year. Works by the same authors in the same year (2020a, 2020b), group authors and the other fine points of APA’s ordering rules need your eye. A list kept by a reference manager (Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) or by Word’s bibliography field is left in its order: choose APA 7 there and refresh the list.
• The tool cannot tell whether a work really has a DOI: it says when one is likely to exist so you can look it up.
• MLA and Chicago are not supported yet.
• Your course or institution may ask for something APA does not (a wider binding margin, a numbered abstract page): turn those switches off and set them in Word.

Privacy

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