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Pasting Text from Microsoft Word into the Text Editor

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Help needed. I'm managing a team of bloggers that use Microsoft Word to edit content. They want to paste this into MT, but when they do, Microsoft puts in a bunch of formatting code into the text editor. Yucky. Looks like this:

A good way to make friends is to introduce yourself.

but it should look like this:

A good way to make friends is to introduce yourself.

I'm looking for an easy solution for bloggers who aren't very tech savvy. One solution would be to have them all save their documents as text only (.txt files), then close them, open them again, copy text-only version, and paste into the text editor. Lots of steps for them.

Is there an easier way to just strip all of this extra formatting in a single click?

Reported on Movable Type 4.2

8 Replies

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  • I have moved users over to Microsoft Livewriter http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ gives them the familiarity of Word without the formating crud.

  • Looks like that would require them installing a new word processing program, something my novice users don't want to do. I'm looking for some simple filtering, or some tag-stripping automation, where Word can still be used, but the formatting crud is not.

  • Yes, Notepad is a solution, but it requires an extra few steps. Why can't MT provide a "paste as plain text" command? Other systems allow for this sort of thing, why is this so hard in MT?

  • There are no other editors that can do this properly. It's Microsoft that should change the amount of code that is copied along with the text you want to use... So the Notepad solution is the best. Or...(even better)...have the users write their text directly into the editor. That's what it's for :-)

    Also you might consider changing the default text formatting in the editor to 'Convert Line Breaks'. This is the best way to prevent users from adding their own style and formatting to the text anyway.

  • At work with word files I usually use-recover doc file software.Because this tool helped me many times and has free status,moreover program can too effectively recover the text information from corrupted Microsoft Word documents and templates.

  • Well, in office environs there's what should be done and what can be done, especially since we developers can't fire the users or ban them for writing because they're slow to pick up new techniques. Trust me, I'm dealing with that now. Training helps, but doesn't remove the issue.

    That said, the above made me think that this is more of a feature request, now. Several people have mentioned good work-arounds (saving as plain text & copying that, or switching the MT editor Format option to Convert Line Breaks and pasting (and possibly back to another editor like Rich Text). I think Ken Kinard's "Paste as Text" would be an excellent feature request. A plugin that would check for MS Word XML and clean it out upon auto-save(?) would be even better. Hmm.

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    Couple days ago I was working with my doc files and unexpectedly something happened. And all of them were lost. I didn't know what to do next,but to my good fortune called a friend up and he advised me - word was unable to read this document 2007. This software solved my issue for seconds and absolutely free I was astonished. Moreover the tool demonstrated me how it exports recovered content into a new file in Microsoft Word format.

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If you need to share template code, replace all the "<" signs with "&lt;" or use this utility.

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