Cleaning up your webpage code after pasting from Microsoft Word

Frequently you may copy and paste text into your Wild Apricot web page from Microsoft Word. This can result in a lot of invisible formatting codes being inserted into your page which interfere with Wild Apricot web page editor. Typical symptoms include:

• You are unable to change formatting of some pieces of text in Wild Apricot page editor - nothing happens when you use formatting buttons.
• Page looks OK on some computers - but content looks messy or jumps around page on other computers.

There are two ways that Wild Apricot can fix these formatting problems for you. We recommend using both together.

Automatic clean up of Word Code.

The first is a process that runs automatically every few fractions of a second that looks for formatting created in Microsoft Word and cleans this automatically, replacing it with proper HTML coding. Most of the time you will not notice this, but if you are pasting in a large amount of content with a lot of formatting in it, you may notice your screen flicker for a fraction of a second.

Clean up HTML button.

While the Automatic clean up will clear any extra code from Microsoft Word, we also recommend using the Clean-up HTML button whenever you copy-paste into Wild Apricot editor. This is a more powerful than the automatic clean up, and it will do its best to preserve as much of the formatting as possible while removing all quirky hidden formatting codes from a variety of sources.

This button is located in Wild Apricot editor toolbar, see Editing web pages: