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.
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!