Help for authors timid about technology
If you’ve tried to copy/paste from Microsoft Word into WordPress, you may have noticed a lot of strange code that appears. This is Microsoft Word specific code that WordPress can’t read.
Now, this might normally be a problem, but the gurus at WordPress have provided you with a handy little “Paste from Word” button which does all the work of stripping out that Word-specific code for you! It even leaves your hyperlinks and most formatting intact.
As you can see, it’s the little button with a clipboard and the word icon. Clicking on this button brings up a special Paste From Word pane:
To paste from Word, copy the text from your Word document and then paste it into this pane, using the Keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-V. WordPress automatically strips out all that Word code (be aware that sometimes it adds extra line breaks between paragraphs as well). Press “Insert” to add the text to your post or page, and you’re done!
Note: If you create headings in Word, they will not be recognized as headings in WordPress, which isn’t good news for SEO. If you anticipate having a lot of headings in your post, it may be best to type the post with the headings in normal text, and change them to headings once you’ve pasted into WordPress.
I have used this method for a long time. However, when I upgraded from Word 2007 to Word 2010, it does not work as well. I get an extra blank line between paragraphs, and I lose bold or italics. Didn’t do that with Word 2007. It’s a pain to go back through the post and put those features back in.
Thomas, I tired it and noticed two things: I lose my formatting and it still doesn’t strip out all the extra code.
Is there any reason I don’t want to directly paste my Word text directly into the form? It seems to work for me.
Microsoft Word code can break the webpage for certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer (yes you read that correctly). This is classic Microsoft not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing. Newer versions of IE do a better job with MS Word code but it is better to be safe than sorry.