Cleanly Copy Word Docs to Your Blog
If you use Word to write your drafts, you’ve probably encountered formatting issues when copying them to your blog or other online posting outlets. Here’s a trick that will strip all of Word’s internal formatting and produce clean copy on your post.
Behind the text you see while creating a Word document is a set of code that contains all of the formatting information to correctly display that text. Many times when you copy and paste from Word to an online posting source, that formatting gets carried along with it. At that point, you have two choices. You can either manually remove all the Word formatting, or start the habit of saving all of your Word documents as plain .txt files.
There’s an easier way.
All blog platforms give you a text editor with two ways to enter the information.
- In Blogger, the two views are Edit HTML and Compose.
- In WordPress, they are Visual and HTML.
Pasting the contents from Word to the HTML view strips it of all formatting leaving you with a clean copy. You can simply return to the Compose or Visual mode to easily re-create any special formatting, such as words in bold or colored text or links.
One of the other tricks I’ve found helpful is to include the full URL of a link in the Word draft. That way, it will be easily available after pasting in my blog editor. It will usually look something like this:
Visit Just the FAQs (http://www.JustTheFAQs.net) for more helpful resources on blogs and websites. Be aware that on WordPress, entering a link in the HTML mode has less options than in Visual mode. Look for another blog post on that soon.
Using the HTML mode for copying lets you save your drafts as a Word document without having to create a second plain text version or manually having to remove extraneous formatting.
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