Pasting from Word

Submitted by pwadmin on

It's very tempting to prepare the text you want on your web page in another program, like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, WordPerfect, Pages, OpenOffice, LibreOffice (or something similar); but it's not a great idea.

Unfortunately, these programs work differently from web pages. When you copy-and-paste from one of these programs into a website, the word processing program tries to be helpful and share it's styles with the web page. But, 99% of the time, it ends up making a big complicated mess that does not import well into a web page (even if you use an "export to HTML" feature).

If your content is looking funny and you can't seem to do anything to fix it, that usually means that some of the Word formatting has made it into your webpage.

The Paste From Word button

TinyMCE includes a Paste from Word feature which cleans out most of the Word mess. It improves the situation some, but it's not perfect... in some cases you will notice something unusual, like all the text being bold (if something similar happens, follow the steps in the Properly pasting content in your webpage section below).

To use the Paste from Word button:

  1. Copy the text you want to insert
  2. Click the Paste from Word button in the toolbar.
  3. A Paste from Word dialog will appear.
  4. Click in the text area of the dialog.
  5. Paste the text.
  6. Click the Insert button in the dialog. You will be returned to the editor, and your text will appear in the body editor.

Properly pasting content in your webpage

If all else fails, you must use a separate program to paste content into your web page. If you don't have anything else, the following programs are installed on most computers:

  • Windows: use  Notepad (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Notepad):
  1. Copy the text you want to insert.
  2. Start Notepad.
  3. Paste your text into Notepad.
  4. Select everything you just pasted (Edit > Select All or Ctrl+a)
  5. Copy the text a second time (from Notepadthis time).
    • This is the step that everyone messes up at some point; if you don't re-copy the text properly, then you are just copy-and-pasting directly from Word and you will have problems with things looking funny on your page. Delete the funny text, then do steps 3-5 again.
  6. Paste the text into your web page.
  • Macintosh: Use  TextEdit (click Finder, go to your Applications folder, and double-click TextEdit):
    1. Copy the text you want to insert.
    2. Start TextEdit.
    3. From the Format menu, click Make Plain Text or press Command+Shift+T.
    4. Paste your text into TextEdit.
    5. Select everything you just pasted (Edit > Select All or Command+a)
    6. Copy the text a second time (from TextEditthis time).
      • This is the step that everyone messes up at some point; if you don't re-copy the text properly, then you are just copy-and-pasting directly from Word and you will have problems with things looking funny on your page. Delete the funny text, then do steps 3-5 again.
    7. Paste the text into your web page.