Responding to RFPs can feel like a full-time job. That’s because it is a full-time job sometimes. Often, that’s not because of the questions but because the formatting is just insane. 

You know: your sales and proposals teams have seen it all. 

• Excel files with 45 tabs to click through and get lost in
• Overly engineered web portals that feel confusing and complicated 
• Legal-heavy Word docs with jargon you have to muddle through just to get to the point
• PDFs that were surely designed to thwart all hope of automation (and salvation)

But it’s not all gloom and doom anymore because you’re done wrestling with these manually. AI tools can help you slice through the weirdness and get to the answers fast. 

Here, we’ll break down the top five strangest RFP response formats your sales teams are staring down. And we’ll look you can get them done with AI RFP automation, so you can get rid of the headaches. 

1. The Really, Really, Really Big Excel Sheet

This format looks more like forensic accounting than a sales opportunity. You open it, and you want to close it right back up again. Dozens of tabs. Hundreds of rows. Hidden columns. Color coding with no legend. 

You spend more time decoding this behemoth than actually responding to it. 

The real problem: The heart of the issue here is that the spreadsheets often contain a mix of requirements, instructions, and disclaimers that all blur together. And let’s not even get started on duplicative questions. Your team is likely wasting hours trying to locate the section where a response is actually required. 

How to tackle these RFPs with AI: With the right sales enablement tool, you can select only relevant tabs (the ones where a response is required) and run them through an AI engine like 1up.

This engine will extract the questions, auto-fill with your best-known answers, and flag anything you should manually review. 

No more fighting with spreadsheet formatting. 

2. The Web-Based RFP Questionnaire

Sure, it sounds modern. It’s a web-based RFP portal.

No file downloads. A centralized interface. 

But more often than not, it’s a UX nightmare. You log into a clunky procurement platform with two-factor authentication, only to find a poorly designed workflow that’s impossible to navigate… or collaborate. 

The real problem: These platforms far too often bury instructions in side menus, have rigid character limits, and lock down answers once you submit them. What’s worse: they’re often incompatible with other software, so you can’t even copy and paste or import and export. It’s a pain.

How to tackle these RFPs with AI: A browser extension allows you to respond to these portals directly and in context:

Our extension pulls questions from the screen, recommends answers from your knowledge base, and inserts them instantly. 

No more toggling between tabs or pasting content manually. You get the intelligence of AI without ever having to leave the platform. 

3. The Multi-Lingual RFP

You open the document… and you feel like you’re in a spelling bee. In multiple languages. Some questions are in Spanish. Others are in German. A few even switch languages mid-sentence. 

But wait, it gets better. 

In some, the formatting breaks when you try to translate it. 

The face-palming emoji was made for this situation. 

The real problem: It’s not just that you don’t speak one or more of the languages in the doc. It’s that you might think you understand what the question is asking only to misinterpret it entirely. These RFPs often come from global companies with teams across multiple regions. As a result, their questions may reflect local regulations, business norms, or platform expectations that don’t directly translate. 

And there you are. Guessing. “Is this about compliance or customer success?” “Does this say product launch or product… roadmap?”

How to tackle these RFPs with AI: The right AI-powered sales enablement tool doesn’t just read languages. It understands them. You can feed in multi-lingual RFPs and the tool will translate them, interpret the meaning based on your existing content, and pull in accurate responses. 

What’s more, it’ll flag questions where you need nuance, so you can have one of your team members double-check and provide human context. It’s like having a global team of native speakers on speed dial. And you won’t even have to deal with time zones. RFP into the a tool like 1up, even the most unusual format, and the it will parse the questions, reference your past answers, and suggest accurate responses. 

4. The Really Long Word Document with a Table that Should’ve Been in Excel

Sometimes, an RFP comes in as a 60-page Word doc. Most of it is in hard-to-read language. Buried somewhere in all of this chaos and confusion is a questionnaire or requirements section. 

But you’ll have to scroll. A lot. And you’ll have to skim through many different sections to find it. 

The real problem: They’re having you fill out a table in a Word doc. Why wasn’t this just made in Excel? It’s much more painful to work with tables in Word, especially with text-heavy responses like an RFP.

But wait, there’s more.

Real problem #2: The actual QUESTIONNAIRE portion of these RFPs is usually only 10% of the document. What’s all the rest for? This makes for a long process of figuring out what needs to be answered vs what’s just instructional fluff.

How to tackle these RFPs with AI: Let an 1up handle that for you. Upload the Word doc, it will detect relevant sections and it will ignore the boilerplate. 

You get to focus on editing responses into strong and compelling ones instead of playing “Where’s Waldo?” in a sea of corporate jargon. 

5. The Free-Form PDF

PDFs are the wildest of RFP formats. You might get scanned images, PowerPoint exports, or text that resists selection and copying. It’s a nightmare. 

And unlike structured forms, PDF RFPs are often unstandardized and open-ended. You sit there wondering, “What in the world am I supposed to do with this?” 

The real problem: No structure means no way to easily automate. You can’t directly import, and you’ll probably have to build a response doc from scratch. That means time and energy. Collaboration becomes chaotic, and version control is virtually impossible. 

How to tackle these RFPs with AI: With the right platform, you can extract free-form questions from PDFs (even the most weirdly formatted ones. 1up can suggest answers and let you build clean and accurate responses.

Even better is you’ll maintain full control over formatting and tone, but you’re not stuck reinventing the wheel for every new PDF-based RFP. 

How to Leverage AI for Your Weirdly Formatted RFPs

Responding to RFPs is already a time-intensive, cross-functional effort. When the format itself becomes a hurdle, it slows down your team and jeopardizes your chances of winning.

AI isn’t just for generating text. 

It’s for reclaiming the countless hours you’re spending with these strangely formatted RFPs.

Check out our deep dive on RFP agents and how they’re being used to automate different response formats. Whether you’re facing a monster Excel file, a browser-based labyrinth, or a scanned PDF from 2007, tools like 1up help you streamline the process and stay focused on what matters: winning deals.

See how AI addresses weird RFP formats. Book a demo and say goodbye to RFP formatting chaos for good.

FAQs for RFP Response Formats