An unpublished thesis is original, unprotected academic work, and worrying about a leak or a plagiarism flag before the defence is completely reasonable. That is why this page has no upload: the .docx is unzipped and read inside your own browser tab. No server, no account, no storage, no copy. Load the page once and you can even switch off the network and keep checking.
The alternative today is booking an appointment for a manual check at your graduate school, or paying a formatting service to do it for you. Check it yourself in five seconds instead — without sending your thesis to anyone.
A free thesis format checker and dissertation formatting checker that runs entirely in your browser. Drop your Word .docx, choose your university and graduate school, and every formatting rule is verified in seconds: page margins in millimetres, line spacing, body font and point size, whether real Heading 1/2/3 styles were used, and whether the page number field sits in the header or the footer. Each item that fails shows the expected value, the value found, where it occurs and the exact Word menu path that fixes it. No sign-up, no watermark, no upload — your thesis never leaves your device.
Drop the .docx file of your thesis. It is opened in your browser; nothing is sent anywhere.
Pick your university and graduate school, or choose Custom rules and type the exact values from your own guide.
Hit “Check formatting”, read the failing items with their fixes, then export the report as CSV or print it for your supervisor.
w:pgMar in every section of the document, converted from twips to millimetres (1 cm = 567 twips) and compared with a tolerance, so Word's rounding does not raise a false alarm.w:spacing. Under lineRule="auto", 240 is single, 360 is 1.5 and 480 is double. Paragraph settings, style settings and document defaults are resolved in that order, exactly as Word does.w:rFonts and w:sz (half-points: 24 means 12 pt), weighted by how much text uses them. Theme fonts such as Calibri are resolved through theme1.xml. Table cells are counted separately, because most guides allow smaller type in tables.It does not tell you the page number of a problem, because a .docx simply does not contain one: Word decides where pages break at layout time, with your fonts and printer driver. The report gives you the section, the paragraph number and the first words of the paragraph instead. It does not check the content, the reference style or the order of the front matter, and it does not modify your file — rewriting a finished thesis automatically breaks cross-references and captions far more often than it helps.
No. The .docx is unzipped and read inside your browser tab with plain JavaScript. There is no server, no account and no storage — nothing is transmitted. An unpublished thesis is original academic work, and being cautious about plagiarism or a leak before the defence is entirely reasonable, so this tool is built so that the file physically never leaves the device. You can even load the page once, go offline and keep using it.
Only .docx — the Word format introduced in 2007, which is really a ZIP archive of XML files. Old binary .doc files (Word 97-2003) and PDF files are not supported: a .doc stores formatting in an undocumented binary layout, and a PDF has already thrown the Word settings away and only keeps final page geometry. Open the file in Word and use File, Save As, Word Document (.docx) first. LibreOffice and Google Docs .docx exports are read fine.
No. The built-in table holds widely used values for each institution and every record carries a verified: false flag. Thesis guides are revised every three to five years and different graduate schools of the same university can differ, so always confirm the numbers in your own institution's current guide. If your guide says something else, choose Custom rules and type the exact margins, spacing, font, size and page number position yourself.
No, and no browser tool honestly can. A .docx does not store page numbers: Word decides where pages break only when it lays the document out with your installed fonts and printer driver. Instead of guessing, the report gives the section number, the paragraph number and the first words of the offending paragraph, so you can jump to it with Word's Find. Margins and page size are stored per section, so those are reported exactly.
No. It reports and tells you exactly where in Word to change each setting, but it never rewrites your file — automatic reformatting of a finished thesis breaks cross-references, captions and the table of contents far more often than it helps. Reading only means there is no way for the tool to damage the document you spent years on.