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Formatting appears broken when pasting from a Word document

When you paste content from a Microsoft Word document into a SiteBuilder page, you may find the formatting looks odd or is lost. This is because Word presents content in many ways (such as tabs) that are not recognised in HTML – the language used to write most web pages, including SiteBuilder. There are several methods to copy content from Word into a SiteBuilder page and handle the formatting issues.

Paste as plain text button

You can strip out all of the formatting applied in Word and reformat the text in SiteBuilder:

  1. Copy your content in the Word document.
  2. Go to your SiteBuilder page and select the Paste as plain text button in the toolbar.
  3. Paste your content.
  4. Apply formatting using the visual editor.

Create a new page from a Microsoft Office document

You can upload a Word document, which SiteBuilder then converts to a web page. See: create a new page from an Office document.

Slow pages or unable to publish

It's possible that formatted content pasted from a Word document can cause SiteBuilder to slow down – or you may find you're unable to publish the page. This is typically caused by a large amount of ‘junk’ HTML generated when pasting from a Word document.

You can fix the problem manually by using the raw editor to delete all the junk data from the page's HTML. If you're not comfortable editing HTML, contact webteam at warwick dot ac dot uk for assistance.

Support

Email webteam at warwick dot ac dot uk
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