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.
- Copy the text from your Word document
- Open a new text document using MS Notepad. This is usually located in Start / Programs / Accessories
- Paste your text from Word into the Notepad text document
- Copy the text from the Notepad document
- 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.
- Copy the text from your Word document
- In the CMS, click the “paste from Word” icon – this has a clipboard and a “W”.
- Paste your text into the window that pops up
- 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.
- Copy the text from your Word document
- 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)
- Paste your text into the editing field
- Click “enable rich-text” again to get the toolbar editor back
- Insert line breaks, bold and any other formatting manually.