Composing blog posts in MS Word and then pasting them directly into the WordPress post editor generally causes problems. Layout issues. Font sizes/faces. Broken validation. This is not really news… but based on activity at the WordPress.org support forums, people sure like to do it. Allow me to share a few thoughts.
Firstly, if you really like to compose your posts outside of WP, have you tried Windows Live Writer? It’s kinda like Word and works so very, very well. I do almost all of my writing with it.
However, if you must use Word to write your posts, for whatever reason, please at least use the built-in editor functions to help clean up the markup that Word tosses around. There are more editor options than what you see by default, and most folks haven’t stumbled over them (yet). We can fix that.
To start, visit your Post page in WordPress. Now, click the right-most icon above the Visual Post editor:
This is called the “Kitchen Sink” button and gives you another row of icons and options. The one most applicable to this article is titled, “Paste From Word” (circled in red).
If you use that, it’ll clean up the Word formatting for you and bring world peace. OK, not really, but it truly is useful and should be used when pasting from MS Word.
And hey, that’s all that needs to happen. Easy, eh?
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April 26th, 2009 
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