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Writing & Editing

Microsoft Word

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Problems

Microsoft Word is a fine word processor for producing documents to be shared or printed, with a wealth of print-based options for indexing, and producing table of contents. As a web publishing tool it is a little less than ideal and produces very messy HTML. The same applies when using OpenOffice, or other word processors.

When text is pasted it initially looks fine:

Paste OpenOffice

But looking at the HTML code you can see that it is full of additional tagging information.

OpenOffice html

The more you edit this post the worse the situation gets. Should a problem occur you will then be faced with a lot of work trying to figure out what has happened and how to fix it. The same code above can be written a lot more cleanly using the WordPress visual editor:

Visual Editor

↑ Table of Contents ↑

Using Word Cleanly

If you decide that you still want to use Word then you should use the Word cleanup feature to remove all extraneous tags from your text. From the visual editor click on the show kitchen sink button:

Kitchen Sink

Then click on the paste Word button:

Paste Word

A window will appear where you can insert your Word content.

Word Window

When satisfied you can then click insert and it will clean the content and insert it into your post. Note that all your formatting will be removed so any styles will need to be added in afterwards.

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Last modified: October 23, 2009

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