WordPress & Microsoft Word

If you’re running your website on WordPress you’ve probably already come into contact with TinyMCE, the visual editor that comes bundled with WordPress. Before you go haywire and start plowing through your website, adding all sorts of cool colours and formatting, there’s a couple of things you may want to keep in mind.

First and foremost, HTML and Microsoft Word have been butting heads for ages. Microsoft has long been known for adding it’s own proprietary – and often peculiar – quirks to HTML, in support of Internet Explorer. This becomes a problem of course when visitors using a browser other than IE hit your website. WordPress, and in particular TinyMCE, does nothing to smooth out those ruffles. It’s still very much up to you.

So you may want to keep a couple of things in mind when you’re ready to unleash your stuff upon the world:

1. A Word About Word

If you’re pasting from Microsoft Word, you have to “cleanse” your text. There are 2 ways to do this. You can either paste all of your text into a plain text editor like notepad first, then copy that and paste it into your post, or you can use TinyMCE’s “Paste From Word” tool. There are no ifs ands or buts about this. If you fail to cleans your text you will wind up with all sorts of jibberish on your page, you’ll probably break your theme layout, and you may even wreak havoc on some of your plugins.

If you can’t see the Past From Word button (the clipboard with the familiar blue ‘W’), click the ‘Kitchen Sink’ button and that will show it and some other nifty tools. When you click the Paste From Word button it will pop up a new window. Copy your text from Word and paste it into that new popup. WordPress will cleanse the text for you, removing all that nasty stuff.

2. Keep It Simple

People rely on visual cues, and styles applied to your website provide them. Links are a certain colour. Headings are bigger and bolder. Lists are numbered or indented. Visitors need those cues. If you run amok and start changing everything, those cues may be lost, along with your visitors. You’ll be able to tell almost right away of that happens – you’ll see a sharp jump in your bounce rate in Google Analytics.

3. Mind the authors

If you have other authors or contributors posting on your website, make sure they follow the same rules as you do. If they can’t or won’t, you can disable TinyMCE for others and have them use a plain text editor with basic functionality.