Pasting content from Microsoft Word and other sources

Despite our best efforts, we've found that Microsoft Word and HTML will just never get along. They can't even be in the same room together!

Since we don't expect either to go away any time soon, we thought it would be good to try to explain how you can successfully add content into your soapbox site that was composed in Microsoft Word.

When moving content from Word into the Soapbox content editor, in order to turn that text into HTML-Friendly text, we'll need to strip out most of the formatting. For this reason, we recommend that you do not spend a lot of time formatting your text in Word (ie bullets, links, bold, italics). Instead, feel free to use Word for it's ease of use, familiarity, spell-check, edit-tracking, etc, but save the formatting for the Soapbox editor.

For the most surefire way to move Word code into your site without any conflict, we recommend you use the 'Paste as Plain Text' button. Shown here:

1. Begin by clicking the above button, (if you are inserting new content into the middle of an existing page, be sure to first place your cursor in the window where you'd like your text to go)

2. When you click the button, you'll get a popup that looks something like this:

3. Paste your content from Word into this popup window by pressing Ctrl-V (Cmd-V on a Mac).

4. Once you've pasted your content in this window, click Insert

5. Once the popup has closed and you have been returned to the WYSIWYG editor, apply the formatting you wish to use for the article using the editor's icons or by placing hard returns between the paragraphs to ensure they follow the paragraph formatting in the template

6. Click Save or Apply

At this point you should be all set!

If you wish, you can also achieve the same results by copying text from the source document, pasting it into a simple editor program like Text Edit for the Mac or Notepad for the PC with the editor set to use only plain text, recopying the text in the editor, and pasting this version into the Soapbox article.