Copying and Pasting from Microsoft Word

Avoid if you can

  • Copying and pasting from Microsoft Word or other text processing programs is possible, but will always give you results that are inferior to writing within WordPress straight away.
  • However, you may need to reproduce information that is already written up for purposes other than internet publishing and in those cases copying, pasting and fixing formatting issues might be faster than re-writing the document from scratch.
  • If you want to copy and paste tables, make sure that table cells, columns and rows are NOT used for layout purposes in the original document and the table structure represents the structure of the information, e.g information should not be spread over several table cells, columns or rows.

Instructions

  • Open the document in you word processor, choose “Select All” to mark the whole document and “Edit” -> “Copy”. Create a new page in wordpress, go to the text editing interface, visual mode. Click on the right mouse button and choose “Paste”. This should give you a rough transfer of your text.
  • Mark headings and click on the formatting bar in the menu (usually says “Paragraph” to start with) to bring back the highlighting of your headings.
  • Use bullet list buttons to format lists again.
  • Use the table menu to delete empty cells or rows and to regroup information if necessary.