Waukegan Public School District 60
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Cutting & Pasting MS Word Documents into Manila

Microsoft has added a lot of excessive characters to the formatting of its documents in recent years. This adds a bit of a kink to cutting and pasting your documents into Manila.

If you created a document and you want all the formatting of your document (i.e. graphics and formatting) you will have to post your document as a web page. (see How to post Word documents into Manila)

However, if you just wanted to write your text in Word and then copy it into Manila, then read on. Sometimes when copying and pasting from Word into Manila you can end up with a lot of strange characters, for example, I tried to convert a document that I was writing and I typed this:

Division of Instructional Programs and Services

Division of Specialized Instructional Programs and Services

and Word converted it to:

<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN style="COLOR: blue">Division of Instructional Programs and Services<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>

<P class=MsoBodyTextIndent style="MARGIN-LEFT: 0in; TEXT-INDENT: 0in"><span style='color:blue'>Division of Specialized Instructional Programs and Services<o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>

When I tried to copy and paste this text into Manila it copied all the excess characters as well as the text. So when I posted my story I got junk.

There are ways around getting this type of formatting. One of the simplest ways I have found is to copy one paragraph at a time. Word seems to add the formatting characters only to large sections of text. If you copy only a paragraph or a few lines at a time you shouldn't get any other garbage.

Another way is to try to delete out the characters that aren't supposed to be in the text. In some cases this is very simple and in others it is not. Just post your changes and look at your document to see where the changes need to be made.

Just keep in mind that this only works for text. If there are graphics you want added to your site, you will have to post the whole document as a web page. (see How to post Word documents into Manila)

Cleaning up Microsoft Word's HTML

I found this on Manila's website and it works great. However, to use the free feature of Textism site, your file has to be pretty small.

You should compose the text for your website's stories in a word processor like Microsoft Word. If you have a lot of formatting (bolding, italics, alignment, text sizing, etc.) in your document, you should use Word's Save As Web Page feature in the File menu after you are done editing the document. Then...

1. Save the document with .html at the end.
2. Open your web browser and go to http://textism.com/resources/cleanwordhtml/
3. Upload the html document you saved
4. Process the file using the button provided on the webpage
5. Copy the Cleaned HTML and paste it into a Manila story