The Correct Way to Copy/Paste From Microsoft Word / OpenOffice Writer to WordPress

As we stated before, copy pasting from Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer directly into WordPress’s Visual Editor is not a good idea, as this will import a lot of styles and fonts – and a lot of unnecessary code – from the word processing software you use into WordPress, leading often to undesirable results, like strangely formatted blog posts or pages.

Instead, you should use one of the following two options to “clean” the formatting your software adds:

1) First copy 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 out and spell-checked, etc. Note, this method also works when copy/pasting small excerpts from the web (to remove unwanted “Div” layers, html tables, and such like).

2) Use WordPress feature “Paste From Word”.

We’ll get onto option 2, because it is quick and easy!

Using “Paste From Word” in WordPress

The image below shows where the “Paste From Word” option can be found.

Pasting from Microsoft Word, or Open Office Writer, in WordPress

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.

Ideas For the Future

In future, it might make sense to either:

Write directly into WordPress, if that is the ultimate destination of your writing, to avoid the above steps – if you use Firefox, it can handle the squiggly underlining of spelling errors, too!
Use Microsoft’s software – called “Writer” which comes with the “Live” (free) suite of tools – this allows you to write to your WordPress website from your Windows desktop.

Any more problems formatting WordPress? Leave a public comment below!

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One Response to "The Correct Way to Copy/Paste From Microsoft Word / OpenOffice Writer to WordPress"

May 22, 2013

Robin Scott
Note that using this feature will strip out the formatting from your OpenOffice Writer or Microsoft Word document. So your headings, bold text, italics etc will need to be re-added to your document.

It makes a lot of sense to get used to writing straight into WordPress for this reason – using a good browser (like Mozilla Firefox or Chrome) you can get the spell checking (WordPress visual editor even includes on, but its not great).

You do need to get used to the HTML editor and how it is a little bit different from a word processor, however.
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