Question:
After pasting text into my page from a Microsoft Word document (or other Microsoft Office application), the layout on my Web page does not look correct.  Symptoms may include:

• Text shown in the wrong color, font, or size
• Line spacing irregular, and/or difficult to fix
• Page shows too wide
• Images from the MS Word document do not appear
• Excess code/tags show in the HTML view of the page (especially tags such as

  )

• Other layout problems

Explanation
Microsoft Word is designed to be a print-based editor, not a Web page editor.  Although the MS Word application does include some rudimentary tools for editing Web pages in HTML, these tools should normally be avoided due to the excess code that they produce.  Even if you are copying and pasting a document from Word into another Website editing tool (such as SiteOrganic), the excess code from Word will be pasted along with your text.  This produces the adverse effects listed above.

Resolution
Do not copy and paste directly from Microsoft Word.  If you do elect to paste information that was taken from Word, the SiteOrganic Web editor will ask the following question:

"The content you are trying to paste has MS Word formatting.  Would you like to clean it?"

You should always click the OK button on this question.  The result will be that your text will be "cleaned" of the excess text from Word, and will be added to your Web page in a more controllable format.  The downside to this approach is that your formatting--fonts, colors, tables, images, bullets, etc.--will not be retained from your Word document.  It will be necessary to re-create these formatting settings in your document once you have pasted and cleaned your document.

As an alternative, you may also paste your document into a plain-text editor such as Windows Notepad first, then re-copy and paste it into SiteOrganic.  This will have a similar effect to the SiteOrganic "cleaning" procedure mentioned above.