WordPress Problems with Pasted MS Word Content

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11 Comments
April 1, 2009

One thing that you quickly learn when maintaining your own WordPress blog or website is that you can’t copy and paste content directly from Microsoft Word documents without any problems. When you do, for example, you’ll find one of two things:

Your content looks strange and appears in a different style from other text on your website.
Your content does not even appear in Internet Explorer.

Why copying from MS Word causes formatting problems

When you cut and paste, MS Word tries to preserve the style information contained in the original document. And this style information causes problems because it (1) does not match the styles for the rest of your website and (2) it often contains information that interferes with how Internet Explorer should display the web page.

Fortunately, this problem has been well-documented and there are a few easy fixes.

Solution 1: Use the Paste from Word Button

All recent versions of WordPress (and its TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor) have a little button in the editing panel which enables you to remove the excess formatting. See the image below:

WordPress Paste From Word

If you are using Dean’s FCKEditor plugin, see the image below:

FCKeditor Paste from Word

You will also notice another button on the left of the Paste From Word button which enables you to Paste as Plain Text. This is another equally useful option for removing formatting.

Solution 2: Use an Alternate Editor

There are several offline blog and text editors which can serve as a great replacement for MS Word. Some include Windows Live Writer, Blogo, WordPad, and Notepad. These simpler editors are great because they add no additional formatting of their own.

Other Potential Problems

If you are the sole editor of your blog, it is easy enough for you to use the solutions above. But if there are multiple authors on your blog, or if you’ve created a blog for a client, you’ll inevitably run into this problem over and over again. So what can you do to FORCE all users to copy and paste using the above method? Not much…

But there is a super useful plugin by Dave at This Much I Know, which basically stops users from pasting content directly and instead presents them with a paste window. For advanced users, this plugin is highly customizable by editing the source code directly and changing some of the TinyMCE initialization settings.

If you know of any other similar plugins or filters that remove MS Word formatting, please leave a comment.

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Tags: content, FCKEditor, internet explorer, TinyMCE, WordPress, wysiwyg

11 Responses to “WordPress Problems with Pasted MS Word Content”

On April 2nd, 2009 at 4:32 am, Kurt Avish wrote:

Normally if i have to copy or quote a part of a text i paste it in notepad, remove word wrap and then recopy to paste in wordpress.

Weirdly Ihave the habit to do my drafts on notepad There are piece of notepad drafts all over my document folder lol. Then I just copy a post to wp when i have to publish and format accordingly with photos and h1 or h2 tags.

Kurt Avish’s last blog post..Google Page Rank Update April 2009
On April 2nd, 2009 at 7:10 am, stratosg wrote:

Well i will have to agree with Kurt. The best way i do my pasting is pasting to notepad and then copy/pasting from there. Just because notepad removes all formating and plain text is what is left. Nice post there!

stratosg’s last blog post..Member Of The Month: March
On April 2nd, 2009 at 11:53 am, Nathan wrote:

I always ‘Save As’ from word and choose ‘Web Page, Filtered’ as the type. This removes most of the Word specific information. Although that’s probably a similar result as the paste from word option.
On April 2nd, 2009 at 2:33 pm, Dennis Edell wrote:

Oh yea this is an oldie but a goodie. I’ve been warning for years to not cut from MS for anywhere…way too much crap-code is input.

I use notepad as well, but may try some others you mentioned.

Dennis Edell’s last blog post..Opening INTERNAL Links- New Window or Same Window?
On April 5th, 2009 at 2:32 am, Ajith Edassery wrote:

If I am using MS Word for editing, I usually copy paste it once to notepad and again copy paste on to the WP editor. I hate MS Word’s quote characters which are many and sometimes URLs can get screwed up because of this.

Ajith Edassery’s last blog post..Blogs could transform into SocNets
On April 13th, 2009 at 8:51 am, Ben Pei wrote:

Yeah just like Dennis said, I use notepad for most simple writing, copy and pasting.

Ben Pei’s last blog post..MIKEY Worm Hits Twitter!
On April 22nd, 2009 at 10:41 am, Kim Woodbridge wrote:

I don’t use Word at all - don’t even have Office installed. I use Notepad++ and highly recommend the program to Windows users.

But I do run into this problem with clients. I can usually teach them to use the paste from Word button. The plugin also sounds like it could be useful with certain clients.

Funny that IE has the most trouble rendering Word
Kim Woodbridge’s last blog post..5 Most Popular (Anti) Social Articles Written This Year
On June 12th, 2009 at 4:17 am, Ben Pei wrote:

By the way, is that MS 07?

Ben Pei’s last blog post..10 Cruel Facts About Working In An Office Cubicle
On June 24th, 2009 at 10:58 am, Houston Web Design wrote:

Great article. I come across a lot of bad code that comes from copy and pasting directing from Word into a WYSIWYG editor. Google tends to associate this bad code with spam as people who rapidly build website for the purpose of spamming, tend to copy and paste from word and produces this bad code. To the commenter above me, this relates to all version of Word.
On August 21st, 2009 at 11:23 am, Renowned Media wrote:

I’ve always done the whole “paste into and copy from notepad” approach, but that always removes formatting. Dreamweaver does a decent job of cleaning up.
Renowned Media´s last blog ..How to change wordpress tag cloud font sizes
On November 26th, 2009 at 6:51 am, Freelance Web Designer wrote:

The best way i do my pasting is pasting to notepad and then copy/pasting from there. Just because notepad removes all formating and plain text is what is left.
Freelance Web Designer´s last blog ..Free Wordpress Template: Sang Saka

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