The latest version of XTM has improved the visual editor for Word documents and it can now be used in the tasks assigned with this type of file. This feature allows the user to see a preview of the final format of the translated document.
This visual editor can be activated for any DOCX or DOC document through the options of the XTM task selecting Open XTM Workbench in XTM Visual Mode:
The Workbench editor for XTM will open as usual but with a preview window on top of it:
This preview can be useful, for example, to see the final format. Also, the preview helps you to know where the text appears in the document to better understand its context and if this has some effect on the translation.
It is important to understand, however, that this is just a preview, the final document may still have some differences with it because of settings like the font and page size, margins, or images may be shown differently. So using the source file as a reference when possible is always best practice.