Document formatting using artificial intelligence.
Document formatting should not be a difficult task for artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, the creators of language models and major applications that provide access to them have not paid much attention to this task. ChatGPT 5, Claude, Gemini, and Grok can add headings, bold text, etc. However, they are not proficient at it. I am also surprised and saddened that Copilot in Microsoft Word documents and Gemini in Google Docs cannot format documents.
Dedicated tools such as AI Doc Maker or Slite come to the rescue. You don’t even need to log in to use them. We can download the formatted file directly to Word. However, after logging in, we gain access to many useful features.
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Table of Contents
What is important in document editing software?
For long documents, the table of contents is essential. Therefore, the ability to quickly create headings of different levels is important to me in the first place, making it possible to generate a table of contents automatically in Word or Google Docs.
Photo handling is also important to me. Manually copying a dozen or several dozen images takes some time.
Next, I focus on aesthetics, adding footers, charts, etc. A tool without table-of-contents support but capable of creating beautiful documents full of infographics is also useful, but only for short documents of no more than a few pages.
A Dedicated AI-Powered Tool Designed for Document Formatting
Slite
The tool already mentioned in the introduction, namely the mini app for quickly formatting documents. It is completely free, and you don’t need to log in to use it. In addition to formatting, this mini app slightly changes the text, which can sometimes be an advantage and sometimes a drawback; however, it lacks a feature for locking content changes. But this problem disappears when you create an account.
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The full Slite.com application is a tool dedicated to creating knowledge bases (company wikis). Similar features are offered, for example, by Atlassian’s Confluence (a knowledge base for Jira); this functionality can also be found in ClickUp, for instance.
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Built-in AI can process a document, add headings, and add a table of contents—even in a 40-page document. Additionally, we can edit everything manually afterward.
We can then share it online or generate a PDF. The text can be copied and pasted into Word, but then we lose access to the headings (and the table of contents), although the appearance remains unchanged. You can also download the text in Markdown format, which can be opened in Word, although this requires a bit of workaround.
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Generally, the PDF looks nice, but it shows that the program is not optimized for creating documents divided into pages.
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In the free version, we can process approximately 50 pages per month. So, not very many.
AI Doc Maker
An even better editor than the mini app from Slite. We also don’t need to log in to use it; we can download the created file as a Word document or PDF. In this case, without logging in, we get a better generator; additionally, we can manually change the text and formatting and, using commands, change the formatting style.
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The program is quite convenient to use. Although longer documents need to be divided into smaller parts, the program freezes when processing 40 pages at once. With 20 pages at a time, it performs well and, considering the copying and pasting, it remains useful.
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Although the whole thing feels like a vibecoded app. The window for switching between the AI chat and the preview is rather odd, and when the text being edited is What You See Is What You Get, it does not make much sense. And in the case of a table of contents, we have a better preview in the workspace.
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Formatmagic.ai
The application looks nice, but at the moment it isn’t very practical. There are stability issues (it doesn’t work in all browsers); in the free version, you can only edit short documents, and there’s a Formatmagic advertisement at the bottom of every page, which undermines the purpose of having attractive documents.
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Gamma App
I have already recommended the Gamma App on this blog, It is a very good tool for quickly creating websites that can be used as prototypes or presentations. In addition to creating websites, the application also allows you to create presentations and documents. However, both the presentations and the documents are based on a design derived from websites.
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The result is very good, although Gamma App is not suitable for typical document editing; the program is based on a card system rather than pages.
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The Gamma app therefore has two uses. It is useful in the early stages of creating a document or blog post, because it allows us to produce ready-made charts and other visually appealing elements. If we already have the text ready and want to make it look good, Gamma is also useful; however, it is not possible to conveniently create a document this way that can later be edited in Word. On the other hand, we can edit everything online.
The table of contents (which is crucial for me in larger documents) also doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t include indentation based on the heading hierarchy; all headings are displayed at the same level, with the hierarchy reserved for nested cards.
In Gamma App, we can paste just the text, but we can also upload an entire file, such as a PDF or Word document. This allows us to edit the file along with its images. A major advantage of this program is its ability to create attractive charts. There are many AI-based programs that can create charts—even the famous ChatGPT handles this quite well. The advantage of Gamma App is that a dozen or so charts matching the text are generated immediately, and the program itself finds passages that can be illustrated in this way.
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Editing a file in Gamma App takes quite a long time, up to 20 minutes. We cannot close the given tab, and it may consume as much as 600 MB of RAM, which can sometimes be an obstacle.
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At the bottom of each page, we have a fairly prominent Gamma advertisement. This is somewhat of a problem, but not as significant as in the case of FormatMagic.AI, because the document looks nicer and does not resemble a typical document as much as it does a presentation.
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Editing a PDF created by Gamma in Word is not the best solution.
Napkin AI
An application for creating attractive infographics/simple charts. It does not support photos or headings, but the ability to conveniently create charts on a specific topic is a significant advantage.
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How to Retrieve Content from the Blog?
The direct motivation for writing this article was a problem with downloading articles from the blog. There are plugins for this, of course, but they are not very convenient; besides, the fewer plugins on a website, the better. The plugin that downloaded an article directly into Word rather than PDF was removed from WordPress a few months ago, precisely because of security vulnerabilities.
In practice, simply selecting everything and copying it is just more convenient.
The simplest solutions are the best.
My workflow for writing blog posts is as follows: First, I write the text in Word, then I copy it to the blog (correcting certain sections along the way using ChatGPT). When copying from Word to WordPress, all headings—and consequently the table of contents—as well as the layout of the images are preserved. For this reason, when I sometimes needed to download an article from the blog into documents, I would copy the text to Word by default. And this is where a problem arose: when copying it this way, the headings disappear (only the heading formatting remains).
That’s when I started looking for various AI-based solutions to help format the document. Such tools are useful not only for retrieving already formatted content; the ability to transform raw text into a polished document is also very valuable. I decided to test an agent in ChatGPT. To do this, I created a Google Document, enabled public access (so that the ChatGPT agent could access it without logging in), and pasted the text from the blog into it. It turned out that when pasting text into a Google Document, the headings do not disappear.
Later, such text can be downloaded as a Word file if you want to have it on your disk.
Other solutions
Canvas Mode in Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini
If there are no images in the text, we can use Canvas mode, available in most large language model clients.
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Agent Mode in ChatGPT
The aforementioned agent in ChatGPT. It is enough to create a document, make it public, and let the chat click.
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It takes a little time (about 20 minutes) and probably consumes a lot of resources.
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But the result is very good. ChatGPT effectively added headings, a table of contents, a header, and a footer. Although the aesthetics need improvement, Agent GPT struggled with attractive inserts, but perhaps this is a matter of describing in greater detail the tools it should use in the documents.
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Copilot in Word, Gemini in Google Docs.
Unfortunately, neither the Windows version of Copilot nor Google’s Gemini can edit text that is already in the document. It’s a shame, because that would be a very useful feature.
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Additionally, Copilot in Word is sometimes very slow; generating a response can occasionally take several minutes (and the generated response is sometimes no response at all).
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Summary
There are several AI-powered document formatting tools, but they all require further refinement. Although Google and Microsoft have not yet introduced these features in their editors, there is a chance they may do so someday, which poses a certain risk from the perspective of developers of mini-applications for quick formatting.
On the other hand, agentic systems can circumvent this problem because they can manually click through the appropriate formatting, although this takes a lot of time.