Copy / Paste from Microsoft Word to Wordpress

One of the most useful tools when you're writing articles, is the ability to copy / paste from other sources, e.g. a Word document or another website.  

Copy / pasting from Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer or from a website directly into WordPress’ Visual Editor is however problematic.

It's usually not a good idea because unfortunately you don't often get just what you see!  Copy / paste also copies a lot of "hidden" styles and fonts and unnecessary code from the source and drops it into your WordPress post or page when you paste it in there.  

This will mean that when you update the post or page and view it on the front end, you will probably see a lot of undesirable, strangely formatted text displaying - or strange layouts that you don't want.  All these have been copied across from the source and it's usually not very easy to remove it once it's been pasted in.  You could check what undesirable and hidden code has been imported by using the HTML (or code) view in the visual editor - but unless you are a geek or 'know your code' - you'll probably struggle to know what bits to keep and what to delete.

How to avoid the hidden codes during copy paste

A much better option is to “clean the text" so that it preserves the basic formatting but does not copy across the hidden codes.  While this will usually provide much more reliable results in terms of getting the basic content, you may need to re-format the text again to add things like styles that match your site, bullets, numbering and headers, bold etc. 

Here are some options to do it. Just choose the option that's best for you:

1) Use a Plain Text Editor

Copy the text from Word and paste into a plain text editor, like Notepad. Just open it up, paste it in, then select all, copy and paste into WordPress. This will remove any formatting information, yet retain the text you wrote. Note, this method also works when copy/pasting small excerpts from the web (to remove unwanted code layers, html tables, and such like).

2) Use WordPress feature “Paste From Word”

Let's explore option 2 a little further, because it is quick and easy to use!

How to use “Paste From Word” in WordPress? The image below shows where the “Paste From Word” option can be found.

 

pasting-from-Word

 

Clicking that button, will bring up a box, into which you may paste directly from word.

Follow the prompts, and your text will be imported without formatting.

Obviously you will need to re-add your own formatting, but at least now you have clean text!

 

3) Use a Plugin

You may wish to install and use a plugin if you're going to be doing a lot of copy / pasting!

Here's one from Victor Duse that seems to tick all the boxes. 

https://wordpress.org/plugins/paste-as-plain-text-by-default/

 

 

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