Markup AI for Microsoft Word — Integration Guide

Use Markup AI inside Microsoft Word to check, score, and rewrite content while you author. The integration runs as a Word task pane add‑in — open any document, click the Markup AI ribbon button, and review issues from the sidebar without leaving Word.

The add‑in works in Word for the web, Word for Windows, and Word for Mac as part of the Microsoft 365 family. The same add‑in also runs in PowerPoint — see Markup AI for Microsoft PowerPoint.

What you need

• A Microsoft 365 subscription with Word (web, Windows, or Mac).
• Permission to install Office add‑ins from the Microsoft marketplace, or an admin who can deploy the add‑in centrally through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• A Markup AI account — create one at console.markup.ai.

Which agents are supported

Microsoft Word integrates seamlessly with the full suite of Markup AI agents your organization is entitled to use — Style, Brand Voice, Brand Terms, Persona, Sentence Clarity, AI Voice, and any other agents enabled for your organization. See the agent catalog for what each one does.

Toggle the agents you want in the sidebar’s Available agents list. A check fans out to every selected agent at once, and results stream back per agent as each one finishes — you don’t wait for the slowest agent to see the first findings. Entitlement is enforced by Markup AI, so the list only ever offers agents your organization actually has.

What Markup AI does for you in Word

• Check & score: Analyze the active document and get a Content Risk Score (High / Medium / Low Risk) plus a count of issues found.
• Run several agents at once: Select any combination of the agents your organization is entitled to; they run concurrently and each one’s results stream into the list as they arrive.
• Whole‑document or selection: Run the check on the full document, or highlight a passage and check just the selection.
• Grouped, filterable issues: Issues are returned as a categorized list. Filter by severity (High, Medium, Low) or by category (Style, Brand, Consistency, Clarity, Tone).
• Jump to issue in the document: Click an issue card in the sidebar to highlight the matching text in the Word document.
• Apply a suggestion: When Markup AI returns a suggested replacement, click the suggestion in the issue card to rewrite the text directly in the document.
• Change Tracking aware: When Track Changes is on, the add‑in works against the live text and avoids matching against tracked deletions.

Installing the add-in

Markup AI for Microsoft Word is published to the Microsoft marketplace as Markup AI for M365 Office. You can install it on a single machine or have your admin roll it out to your whole tenant. The same listing installs the PowerPoint add‑in — there’s nothing extra to add for PowerPoint.

Option 1: Install from the Microsoft marketplace (individual users)

1

Open the Add‑ins gallery

In Word, go to Home → Add‑ins (or Insert → Get Add‑ins, depending on your Word version). The Office Add‑ins dialog opens.

2

Search the Store

Click the Store tab and search for Markup AI. Select the Markup AI for M365 Office listing from the results.

3

Add the add‑in

Click Add, accept the license terms and privacy policy, and wait for Word to finish installing. When it’s ready, you’ll see a new Markup AI tab on the Word ribbon with a Show Sidebar button.

Option 2: Centralized deployment (admins)

If your tenant manages Office add‑ins centrally, an administrator can deploy Markup AI to specific users or groups through the Microsoft 365 admin center (Settings → Integrated apps → Upload custom apps). One deployment covers both Word and PowerPoint — the manifest declares both hosts.

Use the following manifest URL when prompted:

https://m365.markup.ai/manifest.xml

https://m365.markup.ai/manifest.xml

Refer to Microsoft’s Deploy add‑ins in the admin center guide for full details on centralized deployment, including how to roll out to test groups before a full release.

Once deployment finishes, the Markup AI tab appears automatically on the Word ribbon for assigned users — no per‑user install required.

Launching Markup AI in a document

1. Open any Word document (web, Windows, or Mac).
2. On the ribbon, click the Markup AI tab and then Show Sidebar. The task pane opens on the right side of the document.
3. Sign in to Markup AI if prompted (Google and Microsoft accounts are supported). Your sign‑in persists for future sessions.

Configure your check

When you first open the sidebar after signing in, you’ll see the READY state with an AVAILABLE AGENTS panel below the score area, headed by an n/n active count.

• Pick your agents: Every agent your organization is entitled to is listed, grouped into four categories — Accuracy, AI Visibility, Brand, and Content Integrity — each with its own n/n count. Toggle any agent on or off; everything left on runs in the next check.
• Per‑agent options: Agents that need configuration show a wrench icon that expands their settings inline:
  • Style → Choose a Style Guide — select the relevant style guide set up by your organization
  • Persona → Select the desired Persona to apply
  • Brand Voice → Choose the Brand Voice tone you want to enforce
  • Brand Terms → Pick the Terminology Domain to use for brand-specific vocabulary
• Settings (gear icon) at the top of the sidebar opens the same agent list as a full‑pane view — “Choose which agents to run and set their options here.” Categories collapse and expand, and the header tracks how many agents are enabled.
• User menu (user icon, bottom of the sidebar): your account and organization switcher, Clear Document Data, Privacy Settings, About, links to the Developer Portal and Console, an Appearance setting (System / Light / Dark), and Sign out.

Running a check

1. Open the document you want to check. Save your work first — checks run against the document’s current text.
2. (Optional) Highlight a passage and turn on check selection mode (the toggle left of the gear icon) if you want to check just a section. Leave it off to check the whole document.
3. In the Markup AI sidebar, click Check. The add‑in extracts the document content, analyzes it, and posts the result back to the sidebar. While a multi‑agent check runs, each agent reports its own progress and can be cancelled on its own, or you can Cancel the whole run.
4. The header updates with:
   • A Content Risk banner — HIGH RISK, MEDIUM RISK, or LOW RISK — and the issue count (for example, 28 issues found).
   • A severity bar and an n issues remaining line.
   • Severity pills — High, Medium, and Low, each with a count.
   • An All agents filter and a Group / List view toggle.
5. Re‑run Check any time you want to refresh the score after editing.

Reviewing and resolving issues

Once the check completes, Markup AI lists every issue under the Suggestions section. Use the controls at the top of the list to triage:

• Severity pills — Click High, Medium, or Low to scope the list to one severity level. Counts update as you work through issues.
• All agents — Filter the list down to the findings of specific agents.
• Group / List — Group view nests issues category → agent (for example Brand 17 → Persona 2, Brand Voice, Brand Terms, Style 15), with a re‑run control on each agent row so you can re‑check one agent without re‑running the rest. List view is a flat, ordered list.
• The Style agent row carries two extras: a Filter by category control (Clarity, Spelling and Grammar, Tone, Consistency, …) and a quality score badge that opens a score breakdown.
• Copy workflow IDs at the bottom of the list copies the run identifiers — useful when reporting a problem to support.

Working through an issue card

1. Click anywhere on an issue card to expand it. The card reveals:
   • The category label (Consistency, Clarity, Spelling and grammar, Tone, etc.) and the severity tag (HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW).
   • The issue text — the exact phrase Markup AI flagged.
   • The suggested replacement (when Markup AI has one) shown under a SUGGESTION label.
   • A Why this matters explanation of the rule.
2. Click the issue text at the top of the card to highlight the matching content in the Word document — useful for locating the issue in long documents.

3. Decide what to do for each card:
   • Apply the fix — click the suggested replacement (under SUGGESTION) to rewrite the text directly in the document.
   • Edit manually — fix the text in Word, then click Check again to re‑score.
   • Mark as Resolved — record that you’ve handled the issue yourself.
   • Dismiss — drop the issue when it doesn’t apply.

Tracking your progress

As you apply suggestions and resolve or dismiss issues, the sidebar header tracks your progress:

• The issues remaining count drops as you work.
• The audit trail button next to the risk banner opens a breakdown: Remaining, Resolved, and Dismissed totals, plus Remaining by severity (High / Medium / Low).
• The severity bar shrinks and the risk banner updates toward LOW RISK as remaining issues clear.

Click Check again at any time to refresh the analysis against the current text.

Working with Track Changes

Markup AI fully supports Word’s Track Changes feature, including every Show Markup display mode:

• The add‑in always runs against the current visible text, ignoring tracked deletions so flagged content lines up with what you see on screen.
• When you apply a Markup AI suggestion while Track Changes is on, the replacement appears as a tracked change you can review, accept, or reject through Word’s normal Review ribbon.
• All review views work the same way — whether revisions are shown Inline or in Balloons (in the margin), Markup AI tracks and applies changes correctly.

Re-running checks and switching documents

• The score and issue list reflect the last check you ran on the current document. After editing the document, click Check again to refresh.
• If you switch to a different document, run a fresh Check on that document — issue positions from the previous document don’t carry over.
• The add‑in tracks which document each check belongs to. If you try to act on a suggestion after switching documents, the sidebar will warn you and ask you to run a new check on the current document.

FAQ

• Which versions of Word are supported? Word for the web, Word for Windows (Microsoft 365 subscription), and Word for Mac (Microsoft 365 subscription). Word for iPad and Word Mobile aren’t supported.
• Where do I configure the Style Guide? It’s an option on the Style agent itself — click the wrench icon on the Style agent row (in the sidebar’s agent list, or under the Settings gear). Settings persist for your account across documents.
• Can I check just a selection? Yes — highlight the passage and turn on check selection mode before clicking Check. Otherwise the check runs against the full document.
• Does it work with Track Changes? Yes — Track Changes is fully supported in every Show Markup mode (Inline and Balloons). Checks run against the visible (post‑accept) text, and applied suggestions become tracked changes you can review through the Word Review ribbon.
• Are Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) sensitivity labels supported? Not yet. The add‑in does not currently detect or enforce MIP sensitivity labels — support for label‑aware checks is planned for a future release.
• Is text inside text boxes and shapes checked? No. Shape text is deliberately not extracted — see Known limitations below.
• Will this change my images or charts? No — images and charts are never modified.
• Can I undo a suggestion I just applied? Yes — use Word’s Undo (Ctrl+Z / ⌘+Z) immediately after applying. If Track Changes is on, you can also Reject the change from the Review ribbon.

Under consideration

We’re exploring the following enhancements, though we can’t commit to specific timelines yet.

• Adding issue details to the document as a Word comment, directly from the sidebar.

Known limitations

• Non‑text elements (images, drawings) aren’t analyzed. Markup AI focuses on textual content.
• Text boxes and shapes aren’t analyzed. Word’s shape‑text surface can crash Word for Mac on documents containing legacy drawing objects, so the add‑in no longer reads it at all — shapes appear as an inert placeholder in the extracted content, and Apply suggestion isn’t offered inside them.
• SmartArt, WordArt, charts, and OLE objects aren’t supported — their content isn’t extracted, so it’s neither analyzed nor modified.
• Table of contents entries are skipped. A TOC is a copy of heading text that already appears in the body, so checking it would double‑report every heading issue and any fix would be overwritten the next time Word refreshes the field. Fix the heading itself, then update the TOC.
• Footnotes and endnotes are extracted and shown in the sidebar, but they’re read‑only — you can review flagged content in the sidebar card, but the Apply suggestion action won’t select or replace footnote or endnote text in place.