Why You Shouldn’t Use MS Word With Blogs
Most people use word processing programs such as Word or WordPerfect to create documents. These programs work great for ebooks, print items, attachments, etc. However, they often wreak havoc with blogs.
Blogs, such as WordPress and Blogger, have a style sheet (CSS) which controls the text, among other things. When you write your post or article in Word and then copy and paste it directly into your blog there is often a code conflict or extra coding from Word is left behind. When this happens, you may see a multitude of problems.
A few of the most common are:
Font Style and Size Problems – Font styles and sizes may be different. You may see multiple fonts within a single post or different fonts for different posts. It’s important to use a single type of font throughout the entire blog so that it looks more unified and professional.
Spacing Problems – When paragraphs are not uniformly spaced throughout your blog, it can be difficult for your visitors to read your articles. If they don’t read, you will may lose sales. Often times, paragraph divisions are missing or some have double spaces between sentences where others are single-spaced.
Punctuation Problems – Quotes, apostrophes, and ampersands may appear as strange symbols. Have you seen a post with a diamond and a question mark instead of an apostrophe? The cause is often a code conflict with Word or another word processor.
RSS Feed Problems – When quotes, punctuation, and text don’t appear correctly, your RSS feed may be affected. In some cases, the feed can become invalid and is relatively useless to you.
This problem isn’t limited to only blogs. Many article and press release directories, online forms, webpage editors, autoresponder programs, etc have the same type of conflicts. It’s important to eliminate as many conflicts as possible to ensure you maintain a professional online appearance.
So how do you use your favorite word processor to add articles and posts to your blog? Simply write your article in the program of your choice and save it as usual. Then copy and paste the article into Notepad and save as a .txt document. Notepad will strip away the formatting code that Word and other word processors add.
Be sure to read over the article once more after you put it in Notepad to remove any strange symbols left behind. Also, using the “Format” option at the top of Notepad, make sure “Wrap Text” is UNCHECKED. This will allow your paragraphs to naturally wrap to the default settings of the blog or CMS.
When you are ready to add your article to your blog, copy and paste directly from Notepad. Once the text is pasted into your blog, you can add formatting such as bulleted lists, underlining or bolding text, etc. This should be done using the text editor included with the blogging or content management system you are using. Yes, this does add an extra step to the process but in the end, you’ll have a much more professional looking blog.
Note: I’ve worked with some blogs that have a “paste from word” plugin or option available. With some of them, the tool worked great but with others, there were still issues. This is why I didn’t recommend using it.
