Best Practices for Importing Content from Microsoft Word to VanillaSoft

Pasting content from Microsoft Word into the WYSIWYG editor can cause serious problems if it is not done correctly. The WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor is used when administrators create call scripts or email templates.

Microsoft Word uses hidden syntax to display copy on the page so it displays correctly on your printable document. Your WYSIWYG editor in VanillaSoft also uses hidden syntax (HTML) to display copy on the page correctly formatted for a website.

What does this mean?

Basically, if you copy content from your word document into the WYSIWYG editor without cleaning away the hidden syntax it will paste invalid HTML markup. It could also paste valid HTML markup (but not correctly formatted for your site) which could effect the layout of your entire site making it unreadable through your web browser and rendering your pages useless.

What do I need to do?

You need to clean any content that you paste into the WYSIWYG editor from a word processing application. The easiest method is to first paste your content from your Word document into a TEXT editor (like NotePad). This will remove all the hidden syntax (HTML code) and will also remove all formatting. You can then paste this cleaned text into the WYSIWYG editor. You will then need to go through and reformat the text.

We recommend this as the only way to paste in text from Word as it will not effect the style and layout of your site.

Although this may take a bit longer it will save having to fix issues related to this issue later on.