Stripping code from Word after pasting to a Blog manually and why you’d want to

If you copy and paste your blog posts from Word instead of writing directly to the posting block you will end up with a lot of unnecessary code that will appear at inconvenient times (such as when you cross post to Tumblr, or when you share the post to some other social media site). Some blogging platforms have posting blocks specifically for Word documents but these blocks sometimes also strip out any formatting or text colors you specified in the Word document.

If you want to keep your formatting or text colors, it is relatively simple to remove the extra, unwanted code. This method works best for Livejournal and related blogging platforms, Blogger, and Tumblr. (The extra code does not seem to show up when you copy and paste in WordPress. WordPress will also not retain any specific formatting or colors from Word, whether or not you use the Word document posting block or not.)

1. Making sure you are on the “compose” or “rich text” (for LiveJournal and DreamWidth style blogs) tab, copy and paste from your Word document to the posting block.

2. Switch to the “HTML” tab. You’ll see a great deal of code. It will start with something like this: <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> Select and highlight all of the code until you hit this tag: <![endif]-->

3. Delete all of it.

4. Switch back to the “compose” tab and make sure you didn’t accidentally delete some of your post. If you did, hit “undo” and try again.

5. This is a more or less optional step, though you might want to do it for completeness sake. Go through your <p> tags and delete this class element: class=”MsoNormal”.

Using this method can save a lot of time if you use specific formatting styles or text colors in your post. Any further corrections or adjustments can be made using the blog platform’s editing tools.

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, Phoenix Web Design Examiner

Rena McGee is a freelance writer and web designer. She has been building and maintaining her own websites since 2003, and has been writing professionally since 2009. She graduated with an Associate of Applied Science in Web Graphic Design from DeVry University in February 2012. She has experience...

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