This is one of those techniques that takes about 3 seconds to do, but about 3 minutes to explain. But do this once or twice and you will have it down pat. Now, have you ever edited a document in Microsoft Word, then copied and pasted that text into WordPress? You probably noticed that what you typed in Word did not show up in your published WordPress page as you intended. The reason for this is that Word embeds hidden code along with the text and that hidden code gets copied over as well, resulting in the strange output. Fortunately, you have several ways to get around this problem.
Your objective is to get plain, unformatted text into your WordPress visual editor. The best way to do this is to type your information directly into WordPress. However, this is often not practical. For example, if you are collaborating on a big report, editing a complicated document, or transferring a lot of information from another source, you might want to work in a word processor first before you move it to WordPress. In this post, we will show you two of the easiest ways to get text from Word into WordPress so that it shows up like it is supposed to in your published page.
Method 1. Use the WordPress “Paste from Word” Option
There is a paste option located in your WordPress Kitchen Sink that will automatically strip most, if not all, of the hidden code from Word text for you. Doing this should make your text appear correctly in your published WordPress page. This should work most of the time, but occasionally it may not. Nevertheless, since this is the easiest way to get text from Word into WordPress, we show you this method first.
Step 1. Write or edit your information in Word as you normally would, then save your document so that it is easy to get back to later.
Step 2. Log into your WordPress Dashboard and create or navigate to the page you want to contain your Word text. Next, open your Word file (if it is not already) so that you have both your Word document open AND the WordPress visual editor showing the page you are editing.
Step 3. Go to your Word document, then select and highlight the text inside that program that you want to copy to WordPress. Copy that text to your clipboard using your Edit menu or favorite keyboard shortcut.
Steo 4. Go to your WordPress window. What you need to do now is make sure your WordPress Kitchen Sink is toggled open (if it is not already). Next, look there on the second row of icons for a little clipboard icon overlaid with the MS Word icon, as shown in the figure below (highlighted in red). Click that icon. Doing this will open the WordPress “Paste from Word” dialog box.
Step 5. Paste your copied text into this dialog box as shown in the example below. (We are using generic placeholder text in this example). Your text should appear in the dialog in a similar way to that shown.
Step 6. After you see your text appear in this dialog, click the Insert button in the lower right. This action should then insert the text you created in Word as plain text inside your WordPress visual editor. Continue editing your WordPress document as desired, then Publish when you are ready for your page to appear on your website!
Method 2. Use the WordPress “Paste as Plain Text” Option
As we mentioned at the top of this post, Method 1 works most of the time. Sometimes, however, it may not work as expected. A little-known workaround in this case is to follow the same procedure described above to copy your text from Word into your Clipboard. However, this for Method 2 this time, click on the icon immediately to the left of the Paste from Word icon. This icon to the left is the, “Paste as Plain Text” option. Paste from Plain Text also strips hidden code formatted in other programs so that it pasted into WordPress as plain, unformatted text. After clicking the icon, you will see a similar dialog box appear. All you do is click Insert, just as you did in Method 1. That will cause your text to show up in your WordPress visual editor. Continue editing and publish as before to get your page on the web. Method 2 is a great technique if you are copying text from an Adobe Acrobat PDF into a WordPress page.
In our next article, we will show you one more way to move text from text-formatting programs into WordPress so that the hidden code is removed. If you have another way to this same thing, we would love to hear your comments and questions!
