Copying and Pasting from Word

Many people like to write up a story or article in MS Word and then copy and paste it to their website. This isn't really necessary and may even cause you extra work as well.

 

Word is a word processor and it has its own form of "markup code." Markup code isn't really a computer language - its a series of tags or symbols that tell the computer how to show the information. Word does not use the same markup as the web. The web uses HTML while Word uses a proprietery system of markup. So what happens when you copy and paste from word is that you get a lot of strange looking text that looks something like this:

 

MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin-left:0in;mso-add-space:auto;
text-indent:.25in;mso-list:l1 level1 lfo1">

 

The easiest way is to write your article directly in your web page. If you aren't ready to  publish it - just make sure when you save it that "published" is not checked. Then you can go back and work on it later. Although the editor in the website may look like Word — its not. Its an HTML editor. It writes HTML markup - not Word markup.

 

If you have to work offline, try using a plain text editor like SimpleText or Notepad to write your article. Or if you must use Word, save your document as plain text rather than in Word format.

 

No. If you already have an article written that you want to post to the web, there is a way to paste it in neatly. In the editor you will see three little clipboard icons in the top row. If you mouse over them, a little "tip" will popup telling you what each one does. The third one, the one with the W, is "paste from Word." When you select this a small window will open on top of your page with an area for you to paste your content. Simply copy and paste your content from Word into the clipbard area provided.

When the clipboard opens you will see two checkboxes at the bottom of the small window. One says: "Ignore Font Face definitions" and is checked by default. The other says "Remove style definitions" and is unchecked by default. For best results check both boxes.

 

We have found that saving a Word document as HTML may allow it to be read by a web browser directly, but that it does not work well on a web page. There is still proprietery Word markup lurking in the background that will suddenly show up in the middle of your article. Not pretty.