Don’t paste content from Microsoft Word into WordPress as the pasted text will also contain Word’s own formatting. Sooner or later, this formatting will stop your pages from being displayed correctly (if at all) in Internet Explorer. If you cannot possibly manage without Word, paste your text into NotePad (or another text editor) first, then copy from NotePad into WordPress.
Or use Windows LiveWriter.
Moderator
Jan Dembowski
(@jdembowski)
Forum Moderator and Brute Squad
If I need to just stop whining and learn HTML (CSS?), I will…
That can’t hurt but I find the built in visual editor to be pretty good. 😉
http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts#Visual_Versus_HTML_Editor
Can I write an article in a word processor (such as MS Word) and port it into WP preserving all my formating, bullets, indents, etc..?
The current version of MS Word does have a publish to blog capability, you may have better luck with Live Writer.
I did toy with the MSWord html format and publish to blog… but had troubles with account interfacing (user/pw to WordPress). That’s why I was hoping to use a word processor of some sort to get the formatting then cut/paste into WordPress. Plus, I like having all docs here on PC and in a cloud DropBox… Just tried to install Live Writer but do not see where to launch it?
There’s a paste from Word button in the visual editor. If you don’t see it, you have to open the kitchen sink (another button in the visual editor).
Last time I checked, the Paste From Word functionality wasn’t 100% effective. It still left in Word’s pseudo CSS that – in some cases – brought whole sites down in IE.
I steer clients away from using Paste from Word because it basically just doesn’t work. They’ll expect it be a pretty exact replica of what they had open in Word and it’s almost never going to be anything close.
The visual editor is pretty awesome. But really I’d recommend getting a basic grasp on html and css, you’d be amazed what you can do once you know what you’re looking at. The resources out there are endless.
HTML tutorial
CSS Tutorial
Last time I checked, the Paste From Word functionality wasn’t 100% effective. It still left in Word’s pseudo CSS that – in some cases – brought whole sites down in IE.
When was the last time you checked? I know our editors have been using it for quite awhile and I don’t know of any issues. They are pasting from LibreOffice or NeoOffice, not strictly from Word, though.
To echo other sentiments though, you do not get 1-to-1 duplication of the formatting, so be aware of that. I’d recommend learning the html/css.
