Pasting into a post from MS Word

[Michael]

Apr 23, 2013 10:53:58 GMT -8 lestatdelctguest said:

Let me clarify.

If I paste it into BBcode tab and it "strips all formatting" --- then I still have to go through and paragraph it out.

In a pasting of almost 5,000 words, you can imagine that's something I'd rather avoid.

What I'm trying to accomplish is formatted-formatted.

Paragraph breaks should carry over.

[lestatdelctguest]

They don't, I assure you.

[Michael]

I'm afraid we don't use Word here at the office, so I'm totally unable to test this. Have you tried composing in a plain text editor like notepad?

[Margaret Smith]

I don't believe lestatdelet is bothered by double spacing at all. It is the fact that she is not getting any paragraph spaces at all when she copies and pastes. And with all due respect she must know how to copy and paste as she wouldn't be getting anything in her posts to identify something is wrong.

I am on a message board that hasn't yet upgraded to V5, so at the moment I am assuming that posting is staying much the same in principal.....so on that assumption, if I copy and paste a large amount of text from Word I also used to get the same problem as her. I use Word 2007, and then I found out that if I run through my word document and double space the paragraphs before I copy and paste, then once pasted into my post the paragraph spaces sit there nicely as single space breaks. Then as I said above.....I go back to my word document and close them up again so that the document looks good. I do know how to highlight,copy and paste. Maybe you are using a different version of Word to me lestatdelet?

[lestatdelctguest]

Mand-

As one who has written for 30+ years, designed and managed web pages and as such therefore used copy and paste extensively, I can assure you I'm doing it correctly. My issue IS... how can I put this more clearly? I open a Word document, I write. I smile, pleased with said writing and think about posting it on our board. I highlight. I CTRL C, I go to the board and create a new thread. In that thread I hit CRTL V, and ta-da, there's my fantastic writing for all to see. Problem is? It's all clumped together. ParagraphA ends and ParagraphB starts right on the heels.

For example if I was writing about 2 characters standing in line at McDonald's waiting on their McChicken and Big Mac, respectively, and the one character looked at the other and said*
Hi my name is Joe*
Then the other character might look back and say, hi Joe, my name is Ted. You sure ordered a lot of food!*
Joe then explains that his wife is pregnant and he's also dropping stuff off at the homeless shelter. *
Oh, I see, says Ted. That's a very noble thing to do!*

These lines "paragraphs" if I wrote them in Word, I would separate after the * and that's how they --should-- paste onto the board, but how you're seeing them here? That's how they paste, and it's unacceptable.



Now on to discussion of experimentation and results:

This is a test.

I am trying to get rid of the formatting issue that seems to be impossible to remedy here on the boards. So I have to sit and type up this nonsense in order to have something to post. I am typing this right now in Notepad, which is as bare bones basic as it gets. Some people seem to think that if I do it in Notepad - like why would a "writer" of any merit write extensively in Notepad?? -- that when I copy and paste into the forum, it will behave itself and paragraph as intended.

I think I'm going to argue that it won't based on what I've seen so far when trying to do my writing as a normal, professional writer would, in Microsoft Word. I've even tried to save it as plain text in word, and when I paste it into the forum "post area" - even using BBcode tab as some have suggested, theparagraphsruntogetherlikethis even if again, as some have suggested, I double-triple space between my paragraphs in Word.

Okay - so that's interesting - the above 3 paragraphs I typed in Notepad, and the formatting, that is the paragraphing as you might say, held. Let's try something else:

No, writing it in Word then pasting to Notepad did not work. It was all clumped together.

So here I am in Notepad++ which as I'm sure you gathered, is not my preferred tool for writing, and honestly I don't think anyone should have to use a different program just because of a glitch in Proboards. I don't understand why you shouldn't just be able to write in Word with all it's powerful, fancy formatting tools that writer's enjoy, and the plop, paste it right onto the forum and retain most if not all of the formatting.

Whatever. It looks ominous. It's going to storm and I'm sitting on my porch eating lame-butt stir fry - or something I concoct that I call stir fry, even though it's pretty much cooked rice with chicken, peppers, green onions and whatever else thrown in. It's tasteless to me right now. My mind is elsewhere. The neighbors are outside pretending to clean their side yard and it's windy as dookie, so why bother when the grash and what not is going to blow right back into the yard? Screw it, let Mother Nature do the work today. God this rice tastes like dookie. I want something sweet like beneights from New Orleans. Let's test out the Notepadddd++ Spell Check. Ha well for now screw that too since I have to download something.

This is paragraph #3. Fiddle dee dee de dum, I smell the blood of an Irishman. I deifinitely need to eat something if I'm going to donate plasma tomorrow. So goes the life of someone who for now is poor. I will make scrambled eggs with spinach and cheese. Way better. Let the inferior peoples eat this dookie rice.





Please forgive the content. It's hard to just do filler for filler's sake.

I hope this has clarified the issue - and I hope that Proboards will figure out a way to eliminate this problem. It should be Word Formatted pastes to Board Formatted - without all this hassle.

[Michael]

I just checked myself, pasting into Preview now strips all formatting. I just copied in a formatted document and it functioned perfectly.

[lestatdecltguest]

Not for me.

www.ana.boards.net/thread/64/beta-test?scrollTo=318&page=1

post #1 Done in Word 2010 and hand separated.

post #2 Done in Word 2010, left as it pastes.

I'll state again that it's not "strip all formatting" that I'm after, but format equals format. I understand that the board isn't going to be capable of -all- nifty Word formatting translating over, but I mean really? Shouldn't it do basic text formats? This is 11pt Tahoma font, single spaced, 12pt space above and below paragraph. Simple stuff. And I've tried altering the amount of space above below in and around the paragraphs in Word and it makes no difference. Please see my post in this thread where I explain what happened when I tried all this out in Notepad.

[Michael]

Apr 23, 2013 16:32:36 GMT -8 lestatdecltguest said:

Not for me.

www.ana.boards.net/thread/64/beta-test?scrollTo=318&page=1

post #1 Done in Word 2010 and hand separated.

post #2 Done in Word 2010, left as it pastes.

I'll state again that it's not "strip all formatting" that I'm after, but format equals format. I understand that the board isn't going to be capable of -all- nifty Word formatting translating over, but I mean really? Shouldn't it do basic text formats? This is 11pt Tahoma font, single spaced, 12pt space above and below paragraph. Simple stuff. And I've tried altering the amount of space above below in and around the paragraphs in Word and it makes no difference. Please see my post in this thread where I explain what happened when I tried all this out in Notepad.

Because people like to copy paste from text editors (like Word) is the reason that we implemented the "strips all formatting". If we didn't remove formatting, bits of the Word formatting code (that no page on the internet can understand) can get copied over. Some systems are simply better at hiding it from you. I'm not quite sure why your spacing is being removed, but my best guess is that it has to do with your version of Microsoft Word, as several other users (with different versions of Word) have reported that this is no longer an issue. 

[lestatdelctguest]

So the choices are:

1. Write in plain old notepad with no spellcheck, no formatting, no nothin' - oh wait, I can hassle and paste into Word, spellcheck, then manually go back into Notepad and fix things, because if I past from Word into Notepad, it's back to square one.

2 Write in Notepad++ which is only moderately better as writing itself goes as opposed to HTML coding-Programming etc. - but wait, I have to download a spellcheck for that. Another hassle.

3. Write in Word 2010, save, paste to the board and manually separate long blocks of text

4. Get a new version of Word for whatever price Microsoft is charging - and hope it works?


How about maybe once we're moved on to actual website ownership, we'll just get a forum that's capable of handling the pasting of text with duh, just basic text formatting? I mean really?

[Michael]

Apr 23, 2013 17:09:11 GMT -8 lestatdelctguest said:

So the choices are:

1. Write in plain old notepad with no spellcheck, no formatting, no nothin' - oh wait, I can hassle and paste into Word, spellcheck, then manually go back into Notepad and fix things, because if I past from Word into Notepad, it's back to square one.

2 Write in Notepad++ which is only moderately better as writing itself goes as opposed to HTML coding-Programming etc. - but wait, I have to download a spellcheck for that. Another hassle.

3. Write in Word 2010, save, paste to the board and manually separate long blocks of text

4. Get a new version of Word for whatever price Microsoft is charging - and hope it works?


How about maybe once we're moved on to actual website ownership, we'll just get a forum that's capable of handling the pasting of text with duh, just basic text formatting? I mean really?

I'm sorry that this might not be the answer that you were hoping for. Unfortunately I have no way of determining the cause of your issue as nobody else seems to be experiencing it, and I am unable to reproduce the problem.

Sorry I was unable to be of more help. 

[Joachim]

The issue with pasting from Word, as writers, is that when you have it set up in such a way, you don't actually *have* paragraphs, you have line breaks with spacing after each of those (which looks like you have paragraphs the way they look on here), thus when you paste, you get a huge paragraph without space.

One of the ways to change this, all it takes is about ten seconds really, you pull up the 'replace' function. In the search, you enter this: ^p
In the replace you put up: ^p^p

It will space your paragraphs properly for copying, pasting. Once pasted, you can ctrl-z (undo) and you'll be back to your regular Word document. It's how I've worked for years. It's simple and easy.

[Margaret Smith]

Joachim........you just taught me something.....I didn't know that quick route until I read your post. Just tried it out and it splits the line breaks up into paragraphs nicely........

This is what I posted earlier in the thread........

The simplest and quickest way to deal with this problem is to double space your paragraphs in your Word document.....It doesn't look so nice in word but believe me it saves a lot of time having to create all those spaces between paragraphs in your proboards post box. You can always go back to your word document and close the spaces up to one space again........just takes seconds. I have been doing a lot of writing and got very frustrated so I did a google search one day......and this information about double spacing fell nicely into my lap. It truly works, I promise you...


So, my method that worked fine for me and which is simple and easy is not much different to what you are saying but, just a touch more laborious.

Thank you learned something tonight.......at least I did anyway.

I have set my

[lestatdelctguesthappyatlast]

Apr 24, 2013 8:46:14 GMT -8 Joachim said:

The issue with pasting from Word, as writers, is that when you have it set up in such a way, you don't actually *have* paragraphs, you have line breaks with spacing after each of those (which looks like you have paragraphs the way they look on here), thus when you paste, you get a huge paragraph without space.

One of the ways to change this, all it takes is about ten seconds really, you pull up the 'replace' function. In the search, you enter this: ^p
In the replace you put up: ^p^p

It will space your paragraphs properly for copying, pasting. Once pasted, you can ctrl-z (undo) and you'll be back to your regular Word document. It's how I've worked for years. It's simple and easy.

OMG OMG OMG THAT.WORKED

Why it wouldn't work just to double-triple space in word setup, who knows. THANK YOU

Mods- give this person a promotion. Or a cookie at least?

[Joachim]

Apr 25, 2013 13:31:36 GMT -8 lestatdelctguesthappyatlast said:

Apr 24, 2013 8:46:14 GMT -8 Joachim said:

The issue with pasting from Word, as writers, is that when you have it set up in such a way, you don't actually *have* paragraphs, you have line breaks with spacing after each of those (which looks like you have paragraphs the way they look on here), thus when you paste, you get a huge paragraph without space.

One of the ways to change this, all it takes is about ten seconds really, you pull up the 'replace' function. In the search, you enter this: ^p
In the replace you put up: ^p^p

It will space your paragraphs properly for copying, pasting. Once pasted, you can ctrl-z (undo) and you'll be back to your regular Word document. It's how I've worked for years. It's simple and easy.

OMG OMG OMG THAT.WORKED

Why it wouldn't work just to double-triple space in word setup, who knows. THANK YOU

Mods- give this person a promotion. Or a cookie at least?

I'm very glad I could be of help.

I'm constantly posting stuff up online from Word (preferably into bbcode for my own personal preference) and I've always had to double-space, so this is a piece of cake for me.

[djinvincible74]

Apr 24, 2013 8:46:14 GMT -8 Joachim said:

The issue with pasting from Word, as writers, is that when you have it set up in such a way, you don't actually *have* paragraphs, you have line breaks with spacing after each of those (which looks like you have paragraphs the way they look on here), thus when you paste, you get a huge paragraph without space.

One of the ways to change this, all it takes is about ten seconds really, you pull up the 'replace' function. In the search, you enter this: ^p
In the replace you put up: ^p^p

It will space your paragraphs properly for copying, pasting. Once pasted, you can ctrl-z (undo) and you'll be back to your regular Word document. It's how I've worked for years. It's simple and easy.

Please help a newbie out here.  I pulled up the Replace function and entered ^p into the Find and Replace field and then hit Find.  From there, I put ^p^p in the next open box and then clicked on Replace All but when I paste the text into a thread on my forum, it still comes out as one big blurb - no spaces in between sentences or paragraphs.