The Curse of MS Word and the WWW

Let me begin by saying this is not a conspiracy theory, it is based on fact!

When it comes to writing anything on a PC most users will think of MS Word.  As Microsoft themselves describe it, "Office Word 2007 is a powerful authoring program that gives you the ability to create and share professional-looking documents by combining a comprehensive set of writing tools with an easy-to-use interface."

So what is the Curse?

The curse comes into effect when you copy-paste content from a MS Word document straight into a HTML WYSIWYG editor, because Microsoft adds so much junk to the underlying code,  it can screw up how everything looks.

Doesn't everyone know this by now?

No, we don’t all know that.  People constantly copy-paste from MS Word.  Who can blame them, it’s second nature.  By the way Microsoft calls all that junk “roundtripping code” so that your content and formatting can theoretically be easily transferred between its own products such as MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Publisher etc.  So people copy-paste from Word all the time, and will never stop doing it.

My advice is do not copy-paste straight from MS Word, you need to paste it from MS Word to a text editor like Notepad, so the all the formatting code junk is cleaned.  Only by doing this will you then be able to use the WYSIWYG editors own formatting tools to make your content appear the way you wish and beat the Curse of MS Word.