Pasting from Word and Google Docs

You can copy text from Microsoft Word or Google Docs and paste it into the text editor. The editor keeps the useful parts and removes the rest, but a few things always need checking before you save.

What Comes Across

Copy the text in Word or Google Docs, click in the text editor, and press Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on a Mac).

• Kept: paragraphs, bold and italic text, links, lists, tables, and headings at the Heading 2 level and below.
• Removed: fonts, text sizes, colors and highlighting. Your site’s own fonts and colors are used instead, so every page looks the same.
• Not kept: pictures. They show as a broken image and must be added again.

Check These After You Paste

Look for four things:

• The title. A title or Heading 1 from your document becomes normal text, because the page title is already the page’s main heading.
• Bold lines used as headings. Text that only looks like a heading in your document comes across as bold text.
• Tables. They come across without a header row, even if the top row was bold. Click in the top row, select the Row button in the table toolbar and turn on Header row (see Adding and Editing Tables).
• Pictures. They come across as broken images.

Fix Headings

Click in each line that should be a heading, open the Paragraph menu and choose a heading level. Use Heading 2 for main sections and Heading 3 for sections inside them. See Headings and Text Formatting.

If you change a bold line into a heading, also remove the bold: select the line and select the B (Bold) button.

Replace Pictures

Click the broken picture and press Delete. Then add the picture with the Image button in the text editor (see Adding Images). Save the picture from your document to your computer first if you don’t have it as a file.

Paste as Plain Text

To paste text with no formatting at all, press Ctrl + Shift + V (Cmd + Shift + V on a Mac). Bold, links, lists and headings are not kept, so you add them yourself in the editor. This works well for text copied from emails or other websites.

To clear formatting from text that’s already in the editor, select it and select the Remove Format button.

Tips

• Check links after pasting. Links to files on your computer or a shared drive won’t work on the website; upload the file and link to it instead (see Uploading a PDF file).
• Don’t paste a whole document with a table of contents, page numbers or headers and footers. Copy only the text you need.
• Use Preview to check the page before saving it as Published.