Why Microsoft Word and your Drupal website are not friends
The most common reason that clients experience problems with the formatting of their website is also, luckily, the easiest to prevent. Microsoft Word is almost universal in offices nationwide, but it doesn't always play well with other programs. Let's talk about how to make sure you don't run afoul of this common website problem.
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Don't paste from Word directly into the wysiwyg editor.
Word's formatting is not usually compatible with true HTML. This means that when you paste from Word into the Body block of your add-content form, it brings a lot of unnecessary baggage along with it —fonts, widths, colors, and other specifications which will make the content you pasted clash with the appearance of the rest of your website. Messy HTML tags that are left open also have the potential to render entire portions of a page unusable or invisible!
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If you must paste from Word, use the "paste as plain text" button.
This strips out any incompatible HTML tags, but preserves your paragraph breaks. You can then use the buttons on the wysiwyg to add elements like links and images.
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Use a text editor instead of Word to compose your content.
If you don't want to type your content directly into the content form, try composing it in Notepad (on your PC) or TextEdit (on your Mac). You can also save documents as the .txt file type. This will ensure that you don't carry over an incompatible style onto your pages.
Following these simple rules will prevent needless time spent trying to figure out why your Drupal site's template isn't cooperating with you.



