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WordPress Tutorial: Cleaning Up Microsoft Word Formatting

By Bradley Charbonneau | Filed under Help, Tutorials, WordPress

If you paste content from Microsoft Word (or any formatted content) directly into the editing area of the WordPress backend, chances are a bunch of formatting code will come with it. Best bet is to use the little “clipboard T” (for plain text, recommended) or if you do have some formatting you’d like to try to keep, use the “clipboard W” (for pasting from Word). Both are located on the second formatting button bar. If you don’t see that button bar, click the icon/button on the right of the top row of icons “Show/hide Kitchen Sink.”

Show / Hide Kitchen Sink

Here’s the video that walks through cleaning up formatting if you do paste in without using the clipboard icons.

February 2010 updated video

If you paste from Microsoft Word directly into WordPress without using the “Paste from Word” button, you’ll usually have some formatting issues. In this case, although the font seemed OK, the browser couldn’t read some of the “fancy quotes” or em dashes and turned them into vertical bars of codey-gobbledy-gook. Here’s how to manually clean it up and get rid of that nasty Word code.


8 Responses to “WordPress Tutorial: Cleaning Up Microsoft Word Formatting”

  1. Learn cPanel Videos Says:
    January 29th, 2009 at 2:48 am

    Bradly,

    Great post and info, I have always preferred to use my word processor only for keeping a place to work on that particular article or project.

    I love wordpress and I have found it easier to past in plain text then format with wordpress.

    Yes Word does create a bunch of garbage when you are pasting directly to wordpress.

    You have sparked my interest here I am wondering how it works with Open Office. I will have to give that a try here soon when.

    Anyway thanks for the great wordpress information.

  2. Formatting Nightmare: Pasting Content From Word Into Wordpress From Firefox Says:
    June 10th, 2009 at 10:52 am

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    June 25th, 2009 at 2:50 am

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  4. dtc Says:
    July 14th, 2009 at 12:10 pm

    Hi Bradley,

    This post helped me sort out issues I was having with the WordPress pages, and from watching your video that I realised it’s because I pasted directly from Word.

    Thanks!

  5. kayseri evden eve nakliyat Says:
    July 15th, 2009 at 1:05 am

    also an excellent Wordpress Tutorial over at likoma.com with complete instructions,

  6. Antalya Evden Eve Nakliyat Says:
    July 15th, 2009 at 8:14 am

    Word does create a bunch of garbage when you are pasting directly to wordpress.

  7. Wheatgrass Healthy Says:
    July 19th, 2009 at 9:12 pm

    Wordpress is a great platform for spreading all the wonderful information about getting and staying healthy.

    I have ran into this micro soft word issue also and this post did help me resolve it.

    Thanks

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    December 2nd, 2009 at 10:10 am

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