Copying from Word to WordPress

[jent]

I just joined a small NGO as an intern and have been helping to lighten the load with a lot of the blog posting.

Every week we send out an email and the team is very particular about formatting it appropriately, as they should be. The problem is, we format it Word (as a .doc) and when we get it out we like it, we copy and paste it into a new blank Constant Contact email template. Constant Contact is a service for mailing out newsletters and whatnot and from what I understand lots of NGOs use it. Pretty much all of the formatting gets lost, and we have to re-do spacing, links, et cetera. If I'm not mistaken, the same thing happens with WordPress too.

I would save them a ton of time if I could find a way to format it as they want in Word and then copy and paste (or export and import) into Constant Contact and WordPress while preserving all the formatting. I should stress that we're not doing anything too complex—sometimes we'll include a few photos with center-justified captions, we'll have story titles be in a larger font size, and that's about it.

Any suggestions for how to edit our weekly newsletter in Word and somehow get it into Constant Contact and/or WordPress without needing to reformat everything? Thanks!

 

[Dane D.]

I just joined a small NGO as an intern and have been helping to lighten the load with a lot of the blog posting.

Every week we send out an email and the team is very particular about formatting it appropriately, as they should be. The problem is, we format it Word (as a .doc) and when we get it out we like it, we copy and paste it into a new blank Constant Contact email template. Constant Contact is a service for mailing out newsletters and whatnot and from what I understand lots of NGOs use it. Pretty much all of the formatting gets lost, and we have to re-do spacing, links, et cetera. If I'm not mistaken, the same thing happens with WordPress too.

I would save them a ton of time if I could find a way to format it as they want in Word and then copy and paste (or export and import) into Constant Contact and WordPress while preserving all the formatting. I should stress that we're not doing anything too complex—sometimes we'll include a few photos with center-justified captions, we'll have story titles be in a larger font size, and that's about it.

Any suggestions for how to edit our weekly newsletter in Word and somehow get it into Constant Contact and/or WordPress without needing to reformat everything? Thanks!

Your best bet is to make an html file that is formatted to the liking of everybody and use that for all future Constant contact and WordPress needs. I've been using CC for 4 years for many clients. Each client has their own format and also wants their newsletters available on their Websites too. So I make a html file for the Website and copy/paste the content in CC and change the links, done. Once one is done, the only thing you need to do is copy/paste future newsletters between the tags. Very simple and not time-consuming.

Word of advice, don't copy/paste directly into html from Word, it carries all the Word formatting into the html file. If I have a Word doc, I copy/paste into TextEdit and convert to Plain text (command-shift-T) to strip the Word garbage out.

 

[jent]

Your best bet is to make an html file that is formatted to the liking of everybody and use that for all future Constant contact and WordPress needs. I've been using CC for 4 years for many clients. Each client has their own format and also wants their newsletters available on their Websites too. So I make a html file for the Website and copy/paste the content in CC and change the links, done. Once one is done, the only thing you need to do is copy/paste future newsletters between the tags. Very simple and not time-consuming.

Word of advice, don't copy/paste directly into html from Word, it carries all the Word formatting into the html file. If I have a Word doc, I copy/paste into TextEdit and convert to Plain text (command-shift-T) to strip the Word garbage out.

Thanks for the input. When you say make an HTML file, do you mean within Word? If so, why do you have to change the links after pasting the content into Constant Contact?

 

[burne]

I would save them a ton of time if I could find a way to format it as they want in Word and then copy and paste (or export and import) into Constant Contact and WordPress while preserving all the formatting.

http://word2cleanhtml.com/ ? If it works as advertised it might fit your needs. (I have no microsoft-products, so can't test it..)

 

[Dane D.]

Thanks for the input. When you say make an HTML file, do you mean within Word? If so, why do you have to change the links after pasting the content into Constant Contact?

When I make the html version for the client's website, the links are relative to the site. They look like this - "<a href="enewsletter/xyzabc.html">.

But in CC, the links would look like this - "<a href="http://www.theabccompany.com/enewsletter/xyzabc.html">

 

[jent]

When I make the html version for the client's website, the links are relative to the site. They look like this - "<a href="enewsletter/xyzabc.html">.

But in CC, the links would look like this - "<a href="http://www.theabccompany.com/enewsletter/xyzabc.html">

I don't have much experience with HTML so forgive me if my questions are too basic.

Are you saying to create a normal Word document and then go to File --> Save As Web Page? That creates a .htm file but also a corresponding folder, and I've seen no way to upload that to WordPress or Constant Contact.

Would you mind detailing how, after using Word to do very basic formatting (left and center justification, font, links, spacing, and inserting photos—nothing else) I can get that product into WordPress and Constant Contact without needing to reformat and re-link from scratch, as my teammates currently do?

Do I open up and save a Word document as a regular .doc, do I save it as a webpage, or is there something else I'm not thinking of?

Thanks to everyone for their help and patience! Once I nail this down I'll be able to focus literally a few more hours per week on researching as opposed to monotonous reformatting issues.

 

[Dane D.]

You can export as an html file. You have to copy/paste into CC. I don't use WordPress so I'm no help there. Once you have pasted into CC, you may or may not have to edit links. Depends on how you write the link, see my prior post about linking. Some advice, if you use CC for email campaigns, keep them simple. Email apps use a subset of html which means they cannot display all the things a browser can. For information on email apps go here - http://www.email-standards.org/

I do recommend learning html, it will help you understand the process of building files. It is easy to pickup quickly and once you do understand it, you can do away with Word and just write in a plain text editor.

 

[jent]

You can export as an html file. You have to copy/paste into CC. I don't use WordPress so I'm no help there. Once you have pasted into CC, you may or may not have to edit links. Depends on how you write the link, see my prior post about linking. Some advice, if you use CC for email campaigns, keep them simple. Email apps use a subset of html which means they cannot display all the things a browser can. For information on email apps go here - http://www.email-standards.org/

I do recommend learning html, it will help you understand the process of building files. It is easy to pickup quickly and once you do understand it, you can do away with Word and just write in a plain text editor.

So I saved it on my Desktop as test.htm and noticed that Word also spit out a folder called test_files. Can I safely ignore this?

And is the right way to show the HTML itself (since saving it as a web page doesn't immediately reveal any HTML) going to View --> Toolbars --> HTML Source?

Sorry for the basic questions and thanks for the help! I'm confident you're helping me in the right direction and that with enough concentration I can get this down.

 

[Dane D.]

So I saved it on my Desktop as test.htm and noticed that Word also spit out a folder called test_files. Can I safely ignore this?

And is the right way to show the HTML itself (since saving it as a web page doesn't immediately reveal any HTML) going to View --> Toolbars --> HTML Source?

Sorry for the basic questions and thanks for the help! I'm confident you're helping me in the right direction and that with enough concentration I can get this down.

What's in the folder? I don't use Word so bear with me. Open the htm file in a browser and view source code, that is the html code.

I was just like you years ago, I was asking questions to anybody who would listen and help. Visit this site for a better understanding of html - http://w3schools.com/. I still go here for help.

 

[jent]

What's in the folder? I don't use Word so bear with me. Open the htm file in a browser and view source code, that is the html code.

In the folder are filelist.xml, test.htm, and themedata.xml.

 

[Consultant]

Email CC support.