A Sound Design

When it comes to adding content to your Joomla site it’s likely that you may want to add articles that you have already written earlier, or you may be responsible for publishing content that a colleague or customer has written. If so, it’s very likely that your content will be in Microsoft Word format. But because Word has it’s own style formatting to control settings such as italics, bold writing, headings etc. when you cut and paste it directly into an article in Joomla it might not come out as you intended when you look at the page on your site.

For example, when I cut and pasted a table containing some data it displayed the following at the top of the page before the data:

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

( etc. )

The reason for this is that Word has its own formatting stylesheet and so does your Joomla site. The Joomla site tries to display the content according to its styles and so does the imported Word document.

So, how do you get round this?

There seems to be 2 possible solutions:

1. Change the editor that you use for adding/editing content. This means buying a Joomla extension such as the WysiwygPro 3, advanced WYSIWYG editor. While this won’t break the bank at around $50 it does mean shelling out some more cash;
2. The Free Option -  remove Word formatting before you add it to your article.

So, if you’re going for Option 2, here’s how to do it:

1. Open your content in MS Word;
2. Open up Notepad in Windows. Do this in Windows XP by going to Start - Accessories - Notepad.
3. Now use CTRL + A on your keyboard to select all the text in your Word Doc. Then use CTRL + C to copy all the text;
4. Go to Notepad. Now press CTRL + V to copy it into Notepad;
5. Now use CTRL + A to select all that you have just pasted into Notepad and then CTRL + C again;
6. Go to your Joomla article and press CTRL + V to copy it into it.

Volia! You now have an your content in your article completely unformatted. Now all you have to do is re-format it according to the styles in your Joomla template. You can do this using the controls such as Bold, Italics etc. in current Joomla editor.

OK, so it means going back over the whole article and manually adding formatting again. Well, it is a free option and sometimes free = hard work!!

Hope this helps someone.

Note:

This article assumes that you are running Microsoft Windows XP. Apologies if you use Linux or other operating system. I don’t so I’m not familiar with programs in other OSs.

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