Avoid Weird Formatting When Copying & Pasting Text

The other day I was watching the CNN ticker at the bottom of the screen and the sentence looked like this:

"Britney?s children get to see their mom."

Did you ever see this? This ever happen to you? It happens to me in our email marketing campaigns in two ways: When I copy text off of the blog (HTML page) to paste into my Email Canvas in VR, OR when I write the blog first in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste directly into the blog.

What's happening is that Microsoft Word inserts strange characters that replace quotes, dashes and apostrophes like the one example above.  Also, if you're copying and pasting right from a web page you may be taking some HTML code you don't necessarily see.

What can you do?

1. If You Use Word - Paste everything to Word first. Then copy what you've pasted. Go to the area you want to paste the copy into in your Email Canvas and highlight it. Then click on the "paste from Word" symbol in the toolbar that looks like this: and a screen with a large text field will appear. Paste your text into the screen and click Insert. You may have to choose a font and a size but you won't get any weird characters or formatting.

2. If You Don't Use Word - Instead of pasting the text into Word, paste your text into Notepad if you're on a PC or in TextEdit if you're on a Mac. Then copy and paste your copy into your web document.

Hope this helps, it sure helped me!

Comments

[weird]

Typically you can just paste the content within Word and Clear the formatting from the tool bar for this Weird issue. Windows Vista however creates a whole new fun game, character map and Word, I play a bizarre game of dance back and forth to publish things correctly. Was hoping to find a solution here. You use to be able to copy characters directly from character map and paste in things like twitter but that doesn't work anymore either.

[To Build a Profitable Business, you need 3 things...]

Hi Janine readers & posters … I'm always struggling to come to terms with computer users who do not realize what you have outlined very well here … I myself if I take anything from any page off the web paste it into my notepad first … then cut & paste from there to a word doc ... its really is the only way to go ... then finalizing the word page it allows a spell check allows or not live links, and all in all its simply the easiest and only way to speed up this task by saving errors and time ... also when I comment on a blog I do the same I had three selling errors in this short post dooohhhh … LoL

All my best to you and your Formatting
Phillip Skinner

[Jonathan Kong]

Nice tip for the rest of us. I used Mac's TextEdit all the time to avoid the these weird formatting. However, before I paste the content into the new file, I always go to "Format" and select "Make Plain Text" to be sure.

Cheers,
Jonk

[Carolyn]

Hi,

Thanks, this was a constant cause of frustration which used to waste so much time and I could never work out why the formatting went a bit funny.

Thanks again,

Carolyn
Triangulardreams.co.uk

[Katie]

I think I saw that ticker headline! And sighed with relief that it can also happen with the big guys. I'm on a Mac and I paste everything into TextEdit, although the tool that someone below mentioned would probably be better. Great post!

[Kurt]

You can also use a utility call Clipboard Fusion to automatically scrub your text as it is copied to the clipboard. You can find it here:

http://www.binaryfortress.com/clipboardfusion/

Enjoy!

[Amanda Page]

I'm on a Mac, and I use Text Wrangler from Bare Bones Software - it's a free download.

http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/

It's very adept at stripping out any extraneous code, Word being a prime offender.

[doan]

i hate when that happens! thanks for the explanation and solution.

[ML]

You lost me at the email canvas. I don't see that icon for pasting on AOL nor do I see an insert button. Can you adjust your instructions to fit aol so that I can fix the weird formatting that shows up when I use aol?

[WideEyed]

So, if I have a Word document and I want to use the text in an HTML file, do I need to first copy/paste from Word to a text file and save it to clear out the weird formatting, and then copy from the new text file and paste into the HTML file?

[Mark [Universal Search] Effinger]

Hi Janine,

Excellent insight. We've run into this more than once, frustrating the heck out of our copywriter, and making a simple email newsletter take hours instead of minutes to "complete".

The Vertical Response "Paste From Word" feature is a time and life saver.

Best,
Mark Alan Effinger
RichContent.com

[Lee Freedman]

In regards to formatting, I notice VR e-mail formatting appears differently in Outlook than it does in Gmail. An e-mail's format in Outlook appears how it should, while formatting in Gmail is skewed. For instance, the content of the VR Newsletter I receive in my Gmail account is all out of whack. Copy is centered, etc. What gives? Anyone experience the same thing with Gmail or any other e-mail program?

[Sam Knox]

If you're using MS Word, you should turn off Smart Quotes to force all quotes and apostrophes to render as normal ASCII characters.

For Word97, Word2000, and WordXP

1. Pull down the Tools menu
2. Select AutoCorrect.
3. Select AutoFormat As You Type.
4. Deselect Replace as you type "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes".
5. Select AutoFormat.
6. Deselect Replace "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes".
7. Click OK.

[Albert Hallado]

Hi,

Great post and very helpful tip! more power.

Thanks'
Albert Hallado