Word Resume Templates: Which to Fix First

Word’s template gallery is the most convenient source of resume layouts and the least consistent. Three specific construction choices cause almost all the trouble, and each has a quick fix.

The thirty-second inspection

Before typing anything into a template, do this.

Turn on formatting marks. Paragraph marks, tabs and spaces become visible. This alone reveals most problems.

Click into your job history text. Watch what happens. If cell markers appear, the ruler shows column boundaries, or a table handle appears at the top left, your content is in a table.

Click near your name. If the cursor jumps to a separate region and the rest of the document greys slightly, you are in a header. If a box outline with handles appears, it is a text box.

Look for shapes. Coloured bars, sidebars and circles behind text are shapes, and text drawn on top of them may or may not be in them.

Three failure types, and you now know which you have.

Problem one: tables holding content

The most common, because tables are the easy way to line up dates on the right.

Why it matters. Table cells extract in an order determined by the file structure rather than by what you see. A two-column table with dates on the right can produce output where all your dates appear together, detached from the jobs they belong to.

The fix. Select the table, then use Word’s convert-to-text function, choosing paragraph marks as the separator. You will get plain paragraphs in a slightly untidy state. Then reapply your styles and use a right-aligned tab stop to put the dates back on the right, which achieves the same appearance with no table.

Once you know the tab-stop technique, tables become unnecessary in a resume entirely. See Word resume formatting.

Problem two: text boxes and shapes

Common in the more designed templates, particularly those with a coloured sidebar.

Why it matters. Text inside a box or shape may not be extracted at all. That means an entire skills sidebar can be invisible to a system while looking perfectly present to you.

The fix. There is no clean conversion. Cut the text out of each box, delete the boxes, and paste the content into the document body as ordinary paragraphs. If the template’s whole identity was the sidebar, you are effectively rebuilding it, and starting from a blank document is faster.

This is the point at which a heavily designed template is not worth saving. See ATS resume templates for why.

Problem three: contact details in the header

Subtle, common and consequential.

Why it matters. Some parsers skip headers and footers. Your name, phone and email sitting up there can produce a parsed record with no way to contact you, which is a silent failure with no feedback.

The fix. Cut them from the header and paste them as the first two paragraphs of the body. Delete the header content entirely. If you want your name on page two of a two-page resume, a footer is acceptable as a supplement, but the body must carry the real thing.

The metadata step everyone skips

A downloaded template carries the details of whoever made it. Author name, sometimes a company, sometimes comments and revision history.

Word’s Document Inspector removes hidden data and personal information, including document properties, comments and tracked changes. Run it before sending, every time.

While you are there, search the file for leftover placeholder text. Square brackets, the word “your”, “Lorem”, and the template’s own example names. A resume containing “[Your Achievement Here]” in a section you did not scroll to is the most preventable failure in this subject.

Which templates are worth keeping

The ones that survive the thirty-second inspection: single column, ordinary paragraphs, contact details in the body, conventional headings, no shapes.

They tend to be the plainest options in the gallery, which is the recurring conclusion of this whole topic. The visually interesting ones are interesting because of the features that cause the problems.

If you want a plain, well-made starting point, university career services publish some of the best free Word templates available, and they are designed to be unremarkable on purpose. See free Word resume templates.

Set up styles once instead

The alternative to hunting for a good template: build your own once and reuse it.

Create a blank document, define four paragraph styles using the route Microsoft documents for customising styles, and save it as your own template. Every future resume starts consistent and nothing drifts. The detail is in advanced Word resume techniques.

Final check

Export to PDF, select all the text, paste into a plain text editor, and read it.

If your name is first, your jobs are in order with their dates attached, and nothing is missing, the template is fixed. If content is absent, something is still in a box. That check also confirms the file has a real text layer, which is what makes a PDF readable by assistive technology, as Section508.gov describes.

Related

For building from scratch, see the Microsoft Word resume guide. For mechanics, see Word resume formatting and Word resume troubleshooting. For free sources, see free Word resume templates.

Browse the ATS-friendly templates or build one free.