Realespace

I would say that 90% of all bloggers have at some point tried to paste a Microsoft Word doc into their wordpress blog only to find a formatting nightmare. This is because word docs, or open office docs add some of the worst formatting ever. If you want to see it, just grab a Word doc, and past in visual mode, then click on code in the editor. You will see almost every line will have styling that you will spend hours trying to remove.

The doc formatting is bearable in your blog, but in your RSS feed it will cause huge problems. In most cases you will not find out about the problems untils days later since most bloggers do not check their RSS feed’s health on a daily basis. The biggest issue is the back tick.

The back tick on my laptop is located right next to the number 1 button. it is shared with the tilde key. The single apostrophe (single quote) is shared with the double quote next to the enter key. Your keyboard might be different

In word docs the apostrophe is a back tick, but web encoding does not like the back tick. If you copy and paste a word doc directly into a Wordpress blog and there are word’s like don’t, can’t, isn’t, etc… you have to manually replace the back tick with the single apostrophe. There are other formatting issues that will break your RSS feed like trademark symbols, but all the other are rare.

The easiest way to paste word docs into your blog is with Wordpress’s “Paste from Word button” located on your visual editor. It is hidden by default.

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By following the steps above, you can paste your word doc into the visual editor with all the formatting word doc formatting removed. This will leave the tags that are allowed by Wordpress.

This is a big improvement over the other ways to format.

• copy and paste into notepad, then copy and paste to your blog. This removes absolutely all formatting
• copy and paste into google docs. This does not remove the formatting but it is a little easier to format from their. Then copy to your blog
• switch the visual editor to “code” view, then paste.
• in Word, select all ctrl+a, then ctrl+space to remove formatting
• in Open Office, ctrl+a to select all, then ctrl_shift+space to remove formatting