Please Don’t Write Blog Posts in Word
It’s second nature to write with MS Word. We’ve been trained to use it our whole lives. And that’s fine. But blogging is a different medium and it does not play well with Word.
Many of my guest bloggers and pretty much everyone else, automatically write everything in Word. This is fine and all. But the problem with this, in a web environment, is that Word puts a lot of crap in it’s text formatting that does not play well with HTML.
Many will have run into the problem of cutting and pasting your stuff from Word into your blog platform of choice and seeing something unexpected. Something is not right, something is a little off and you can freaking figure out how to fix it.
The problem lies with MS Word. Word likes to put lots of crap code and gobbledegook into it’s documents that don’t play well with other applications.
It’s a good habit to write blog posts in Text Edit or Notepad and cut and paste from there. You’ll avoid all the crap code and formatting issues so all you need to do is focus on writing.
But if you insist on using Word…
This tool is simple and brilliant.
It’s called Word Cleaner. You upload your Word Doc to it and it will strip out all that crap code and give you a clean file back.
Pretty sweet, huh?
Keep your documents small as they require a small subscription to convert larger files.
So, if you’re going to blog it’s best to avoid using MS Word when writing your posts as you’ll cause more headaches later when your posts aren’t displaying correctly because of incompatibilities. This simple little tool will save a lot of headaches.
Check it out: Word Cleaner
Could not agree more JT. I think our word people need to start writting in notepad cause we always copy and paste their stuff, so lets make our jobs easier huh? Word peeps start using notepad.
I’ll back you up!
Word? Word… Hmm, I think I still remember what this is
. I stopped using offline editors year ago, due to the technical problems with my old computer (it’s often crushing, even Ubuntu can’t help here), since then I’m using Google products mainly, or just WordPress panel without dealing with other editors.
But finally classic notepad or similar software is OK, making post look nice is another story, right?
I’ve written posts up in Word for years without much in the way of problems. The only real issue–and to be fair, I do it all the time–is that if you cut-and-paste your text straight into your browser, any HTML links you typed in by hand will be screwed up. The way around that, of course, is to save your post as a .txt file, close out, open the new .txt file and then cut-and-paste. It adds another 15 seconds to the process but so what? It’s nice to have the editing facilities of Word available.
Thank you!! I am new to blogging and most of my posts have all these weird words and symbols. I couldn’t figure out why. ( I am learning to write in HTML. ) But I was cut and pasting with Word. then I tried to transfer to my post. It was driving me crazy. Thank you for clearing that up for me.