This is just a quick tip because something came up in a discussion today and I thought others might benefit.

A client was saying that he wished he could compose his blog posts in Word, but whenever he did that, the posts looked funny once he copied them to his blog.

This gets back to the rule about never copying from Word directly into any Internet vehicle.  You remember that one, right?  If not, here’s the scoop.

When you copy something from Word, there is underlying code that is copied with the content.  You don’t see the code, but it’s there.  Sometimes a blog or website platform will try to interpret that Word code by asking you to copy the content into a special window.  However, I’ve found that things don’t really work out exactly the way I want it.

The bottom line is that the cleanest way to add content to a website or blog is to add just the raw content, then use the tools in the editor where the content is going to format the text.

The way you end up with just the raw content is to copy from Word to a text editor like Notepad.  Then, copy from Notepad to your blog or website.  Why does that work?  Because a primitive text editor like Notepad doesn’t understand formatting code, so it strips the code away and you’re left with just the text.

Once you have the raw text in the editor of your website or blog, use the editor there to bold, add bullet points, etc.  Your content will look just like you want it to.

If you do format in Word so you know how the content will look, you need to know about bullets and numbered lists.  While the underlying code for lists is stripped away, Notepad doesn’t remove the actual bullets or numbers.

So, when I’m copying from Word, I will:

1. Save the document with the Word formatting intact
2. Remove any bullets or numbers
3. Copy the content
4. Paste the content into Notepad
5. Close the document in Word without saving the changes

That way, I have raw content to copy to Notepad, but the document itself is still intact in its Word version.

Any other tips for dealing with transferring content from one medium to another??

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