How to paste from Word

When you paste content into the website CMS from a Microsoft Word document, you’ll find lots of unwanted “code” or formatting markup gets transferred along with the text. Here are some of the ways you can avoid this problem on a Windows computer. (Adapt as necessary for a Mac.)

“Clean” the Word text using Notepad

This is by far the best method. It removes all formatting from the text (e.g. bold, text colouring, non-standard fonts etc) so you will have to replace any formatting you require manually afterwards, but line breaks are retained.

1. Copy the text from your Word document
2. Open a new text document using MS Notepad. This is usually located in Start / Programs / Accessories
3. Paste your text from Word into the Notepad text document
4. Copy the text from the Notepad document
5. Paste that text into the CMS.

Use the built-in “paste from Word” function in the CMS

This is easier than the Notepad method but you may find that some of the unwanted markup still gets through.

1. Copy the text from your Word document
2. In the CMS, click the “paste from Word” icon – this has a clipboard and a “W”.
3. Paste your text into the window that pops up
4. Click “insert”

Paste using “plain text” format

Although this is the quickest method, it will remove all line-breaks from your text as well as formatting, so you will have to manually put line-breaks back in after pasting.

1. Copy the text from your Word document
2. In the CMS, click “disable rich-text” beneath the editing field (Note: this link may say “enable rich-text” even when the rich-text toolbar is already enabled; sorry, this is a known bug, but click the link whatever it says and it will still work)
3. Paste your text into the editing field
4. Click “enable rich-text” again to get the toolbar editor back
5. Insert line breaks, bold and any other formatting manually.