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.
As I’m not particularly au fay wit any of these programs, can I create tables in them as I do in Word?
Dear Esmi,
Interesting that you’ve tagged this as resolved.
IT IS NOT!!!!!
Live writer from MS is the biggest piece of junk I’ve ever had the misfortune to use, and quite clearly you havn’t read the core of my problem. Which quite frankly is becoming a theme of late with WordPress.
Why would I copy & paste a table into note pad? So it removes all of the structure & layout of a table.
Clearly the problem lies with the code of WordPress, but nobody on here is going to admit that are they?
Why has the new update of WP now include the nowrap line of code, something I initially mentioned earlier on.
Quite frankly I’m so angered by the lack of support & accountablity from WP I’m actually considering moving platforms.
Why would I copy & paste a table into note pad? So it removes all of the structure & layout of a table.
That is absolutely correct. That is exactly why you would do it. So it removes all the MS formatting generated by content created in a word processor. Or, you could use a real editor for creating your content, not a word processing program. Microsoft Word is designed for creating and printing documents, not for creating real web content.
Clearly the problem lies with the code of WordPress, but nobody on here is going to admit that are they?
No, that isn’t quite accurate. The trouble stems from folks who insist on directly copying and pasting formatted content from a word processor into the editor, an expecting it work flawlessly, despite the extensive and repeated discussions surrounding the issues with doing so.
Are you familiar with the “kitchen sink” feature of WordPress (this is a nice explanation of the feature)…
Understanding the Kitchen Sink in WordPress
…that contains a “paste from Word” option? That might help you overcome some of your formatting issues, if you don’t have a proper editor available.
Hi Clayton,
The original answers & I fear yours maybe the same, isn’t addressing the original problem.
I would create a table, like this one: http://chefhermes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/A-Preview-of-Oct.pdf
in Word as it’s the easiest way of doing it.
Ive been doing this for my readers since Jan 2013, then along come some updates & when I looked at the code there were lines of ‘nowrap’ which meant that table was forced to be too wide. I’m sure I’ve said all this before.
As for the ‘paste from Word’ option, that gives exactly the same results as the notepad option, so why would I use it?
MS Live writer as recommended by Esmi is a pile of junk as it is more restrictive than the current interface.
As I’ve come to realise with WordPress, it’s just like Apple & Microsoft. Updates are rarely thought through & are released because they’re shiny & look good.
I understand your frustration. I also understand the problem as you see it.
The original answers & I fear yours maybe the same, isn’t addressing the original problem.
It actually may be, because the problem stems from creating html content in a word processor. The fact that it seemed to work well for you in the past, may just be happy coincidence.
I would create a table, like this one…in Word as it’s the easiest way of doing it.
…As for the ‘paste from Word’ option, that gives exactly the same results as the notepad option, so why would I use it?
Well, that’s pretty much my point. I think it was probably esmi’s as well. You’re still insisting on pasting formatting generated by a word processing program into the editor.
As I’ve come to realise with WordPress, it’s just like Apple & Microsoft. Updates are rarely thought through & are released because they’re shiny & look good.
I can tell you from literally hundreds of hours of personal experience working with WordPress, that isn’t the case. I think what’s actually happened there, is that you’ve encountered a change that no longer lets you do something that wasn’t really intended to be good practice (but was a convenience for you) to begin with. The point is, Microsoft Word is a word processor. Not a tool for creating clean code for web pages.
Are you sure it’s actually wordpress that’s placing the ‘nowrap’ code in your your document? Is it possible you’ve accidentally set your table properties to nowrap while creating them in MS Word? Simply dragging a table while in an MS Word document might be enough to change the wrap properties. It seems to me a more likely scenario that the nowrap is being added during table creation, rather than during publishing. Is that possible? Or am I interpreting what you are seeing relative to ‘nowrap’ in your source code incorrectly simply because I can’t view a sample of your source code?
Nothing has changed in the way the table was originally created as I used the same template.
I stand by what I said about WP updates, primarily due to experiences recently.
The relative recent update to 3.4.2 has caused this problem & a recent Jetpack update caused my stats to completely stop working.
In the most recent post I’ve used a plugin which was tedious at best. This post used to be one of the quickest & easiest to do, along with a good reference for my readers. Now it’s going to take in excess of 6hrs to do what was an hour job tops.
If it was a commercial decision (which it may well be in the future) this post would have been dropped. Why? because the WP update changed everything without offering a suitable alternative.
Don’t worry I grasp that Word is a word processor, so you dont have to patronise me on that front too many times either.
I can assure it it wasn’t patronization. I tend to re-emphasize critical points in every conversation where there appears to be a repeating theme of clarity related issues. Don’t take it personally. Just to be perfectly clear from this point on…
If you would like to post a link to a live example of the issue on your WordPress site, I would be happy to take a look at the source code for your tables and give you a semi-qualified opinion regarding what mechanism I believe might actually be responsible for adding the nowrap attribute to your tables.
because the WP update changed everything without offering a suitable alternative.
We’ve really done nothing so far to actually provide any evidence that says this is a WordPress related issue, rather than just an unfortunate MSO formatting issue, therefore we’ve made no progress toward finding a suitable solution. If it is something the WordPress editor is doing, you should open a ticket on it so the behavior can be reviewed. If it turns out to be related to MSO formatting, I can say with some certainty that it won’t be addressed. If you have no desire to pursue the issue to the point of getting an actual answer beyond simple speculation, I understand that as well. Troubleshooting can certainly be a pain sometimes.
Best wishes, and take care.
Interesting that you’ve tagged this as resolved.
I didn’t. The original poster must have done so.
While I agree with Clayton that this really isn’t a WP issue, here is a solution for those wishing to paste a table from MS Word.
First paste it into Google Docs https://docs.google.com then copy/paste it into the WP Visual Editor. Seems to do the trick. While this may be an unwanted extra step it does work.
After a quick google I found this thread:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070416092148864
Seems to have some other solutions that may work as well.
