Posts Tagged ‘Word’

Pasting From Word Is A No-no

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

Some of our ListPipe customers have complained that their content has been unexpectedly truncated during delivery.

If it seems that you have only received half an article, or that a sentence suddenly ends without explanation, it could be that you have a special character in your Content Form that is causing the problem.

What is a 'special character'? High end word processing applications such as Microsoft Word use a special hidden code to create some special characters, for instance the apostrophy. You have probably heard of 'smart quotes', and notice that when you use them in Word, you get a nicely formatted version of quote marks that are more stylish. Word uses some special code to create these marks, and that code is not compatible with most Web technologies. Herein lies the problem...

When you copy content from a Word document, you are actually grabbing special characters that include additional code. When a Web system encounters that code it can cause problems. This is likely what is happening to your ListPipe content if you have notices unwanted breaks in your sentences.

Avoid copying and pasting content directly from Microsoft Word. Especially if the content includes apostrophes (as in possessive names such as 'Joe's Bar and Grill') or quotes. To eliminate the extra hidden code from applications such as Word, you can paste your content into an interim application that will strip it out such as a text editor, or use the Word import feature on your WordPress blog.

If you have been having this problem with your ListPipe site, please review these suggestions to resolve the problem; it is likely that they have an apostrophe, or other 'smart' character, in their Content Form:

  • For RelayPipe customers the fix is easy: Simply go to the Content Form in your ListPipe Control Panel and re-type the offending character from within your browser (don't copy from Word). Save, and all should be well.
  • For Hosted customers, you will need to fix the offending character in your Control Panel, and then delete all your content from within your WordPress Control Panel. Send us a note with your username and URL and we can republish the articles to your account.
  • For External WordPress customers, the solution is similar: Correct the offending character in your ListPipe Control Panel, then delete all the broken content within your blog and send us a request for a republish. We will need your username and URL (to find your account in the system).