Copying and Pasting | Computing Support

Please use caution when copying and pasting content into BSOE web sites.

When you copy and paste information from a Word document, another web site, a PDF file, or any other electronic media, often times what you copy is polluted with extra formatting information that causes problems on the BSOE web sites.

The best way to avoid this problem is to copy the content from the Word document or other source and first paste it into Notepad, and then re-copy the content from Notepad and paste it into the BSOE web site editor. This method will strip all the extra formatting information from the content and allow a clean paste into the web site. Once the data is pasted, you are able to then go in and edit the page like you normally would.

For example, here is the HTML code for a sentence copied and pasted from a Word document:

<p>  
<p class="MsoNormal">This is my test sentence to show how many extra things Word puts into a simple sentence like this.</p>
</p>

And here's the code for that same sentence after it's been cleaned using the method above:

<p>This is my test sentence to show how many extra things Word puts into a simple sentence like this.</p>

As you can see, Word puts in a lot of extra code that just confuses web browsers and other programs that use our web sites. So, please make sure you clean your content using the Notepad method described above.