How do I remove Word formatting from my pages?

When you create a document and format it in Microsoft Word, the program adds code to the document to communicate that formatting. When you copy and paste from Word into a web page, some of that extra coding can conflict with web browsers to create a variety of errors. Whenever you choose to copy and paste from another source, you should always clean out the extraneous markup.

(See a more detailed blog post here.)

[Using the CMS tools]   [Using a text document]

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Using CMS Tools

1)  Navigate to the page you wish to copy/paste text into, and open the text editing window.  Copy the text from your Word document, and paste it into the text editing window.  If you are pasting in IE, choose to "Paste Plain".  If you are pasting in Firefox, you won't have that option.

2)  Highlight the text that you have just pasted in.  On the top of the text editor window, look for the icon that resembles an eraser with a W on it, and click the down arrow next to it.  Select "Clean Word Markup" and then click Finish at the bottom of the text editor.

3)  Review your text.  If the formatting doesn't look correct, you may need to go down through the four options listed above. Each one is progressively more through in removing formatting, until the final one ("Clean All Tags") should leave it looking like it was typed in a plain text editor, with no links or formatting or carriage returns.

4)  After using any of these options, you may notice you have to re-establish links, or re-do your formatting (bold, italic, spacing, bullets, etc.).  All of these formatting options are available in the CMS text editor.

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Using a Text Document

You may find that the CMS tools are not able to clean out all background code, and that your page still doesn't look right.  This is most commonly seen when copy/pasting from an Office 2007/2008 file.  In these cases, you may have to do some extra work to be able to import the content from those files.

You can copy the content into a plain text file, or save your document as a plain text file, and then copy it out from there to paste it into the CMS.  Please note, this will remove all formatting (links, bold, spacing, etc.). 

For Windows

Method 1

1. open the document in Word,
2. under "File," select "Save As"
3. in the drop down for "Save as type" choose "plain text (*.txt)",
4. click "Save"
5. close the regular document and open the .txt version
6. under "Edit," choose "select all"
7. under "Edit," choose "copy" (or use CTRL-C)
8. Open your CMS editor window and place the cursor where you want the content to be
9. right click with your mouse and choose "paste" (or use CTRL-V)
10. re-format your text, and then click Finish, and submit your changes
    

Method 2

1. open the document in Word,
2. under "Edit," choose "select all"
   
3. under "Edit," choose "copy" (or use CTRL-C)
   
4. open a Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac) file 
5. under "Edit" choose "paste" (or use CTRL-V)
6. under "Edit" choose "select all"
7. under "Edit," choose "copy" (or use CTRL-C)
8. Open your CMS editor window and place the cursor where you want the content to be
9. right click with your mouse and choose "paste" (or use CTRL-V)
10. re-format your text, and then click Finish, and submit your changes