How To Retain Formatting when Copy/Pasting from Web Page to Word Doc

[mvo168]

Hi all, I am using Word for Mac on my iBook, OS10.3.6,

I want to copy text from a web page to a word doc and retain all the
formatting of the text. But I can't do it! It always paste the text
without all the formatting. Paste Special doesn't help.

How do I fix this? Help!

Thanks,
Mvo168

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Funny, most people have the opposite problem.

How are you telling it to copy?
What version of Word are you using?
By formatting do you mean layout, like formatted in tables; or simply things
like font/size/color? Color should come over, tables are unreliable.

By any chance do you have "draft font" checked in the View tab of the Word |
Preferences menu?

In Tools | Macros, do you see any macros named Paste or EditPaste?

 

[John McGhie]

That's a real pain, isn't it -- and there's not much you can do about it.

In most web pages these days, the formatting is controlled by external style
sheets that are addressed from relative links. Word can't access the
relative links, so it can't read the style sheets and thus can't format the
document for you.

Hi all, I am using Word for Mac on my iBook, OS10.3.6,

I want to copy text from a web page to a word doc and retain all the
formatting of the text. But I can't do it! It always paste the text
without all the formatting. Paste Special doesn't help.

How do I fix this? Help!

Thanks,
Mvo168

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie]

Hi:

Having deeply embarrassed myself with Jeffrey Weston, I now have the answer
to your question (Thanks Jeffrey...)

It depends how you open the web page.

1) Open Word

2) Use View>Toolbars to reveal the Web toolbar

3) Click the first button, "Open web page"

4) Paste the URL of the page you want in there.

This will cause Word to open the web page directly itself. You will keep
all of the formatting (and usually, wish you hadn't...)

Note: An HTML page is not structured like a Word document, and it is thus
not formatted the same way. Web pages normally use nested tables to
position text. A Word document normally uses paragraph properties. Hence,
the mess you will get from opening a web page in Word depends very much on
how the web author formatted his pages.

Simple pages from academic institutions will work well and give you useable
text. Beautiful all-singing, all-dancing web pages from major corporations
will turn into an unholy mess of nested tables. You usually end up pasting
the damned thing in as plain text and reformatting it entirely.

Modern web pages often contain artefacts that are not "Documents". For
example, Flash presentations. These will not appear in a Word document
(although in some cases, Word will embed them, just in case you ever open
the document on a computer that can open such content).

Regular viewers of this program may be amused to realise that my humiliation
is TOTAL!!

I find the Web toolbar so annoying that I disable it with a VBA command.
When you do that, you remove it from the list of available toolbars. I have
had it disabled since Word 2000 drove me to distraction by popping it up in
my face every time I clicked a link. So then I forgot it even existed, and
was unable to answer the poster's question.

Which led to a pungent "Word can't open web pages" bug fired into the Mac
BU. And a somewhat mystified Jeffrey Weston, who was quite unable to
reproduce my silliness

Hope this helps

Hi all, I am using Word for Mac on my iBook, OS10.3.6,

I want to copy text from a web page to a word doc and retain all the
formatting of the text. But I can't do it! It always paste the text
without all the formatting. Paste Special doesn't help.

How do I fix this? Help!

Thanks,
Mvo168

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410

 

[JE McGimpsey]

Having deeply embarrassed myself with Jeffrey Weston, I now have the answer
to your question (Thanks Jeffrey...)
...
Regular viewers of this program may be amused to realise that my humiliation
is TOTAL!!

You're not alone, John. I'd forgotten, as well (of course, half the time
I still use wget to download web pages, so what do I know?).

<vbg>

 

[mvo168]

Hi John,

Firstly thanks very much for your reply.

I tried what you suggested but the URL keeps opening in my
browser(Firefox) instead of Word (Word X Office Release 1).

Mvo

 

[mvo168]

Hi Daiya,

I copy the text in the URL, and then paste in Word (Word X for Mac
Service Release 1). It always comes out without the formatting.

By formatting I mean colors and font style.

I do not have the "Draft Font" checked.

No I do not see any Macros named Paste or Edit Paste
Any other suggestions?

 

[mvo168]

Hi Daiya,
Thanks for your reply

1. version I am using word X for mac office release 1
2. by formatting i mean the colors and font style does not come over at
all
3. i do not have draft font checked
4. i do not see any macros named paste or editpaste
any other suggestions?

thanks,
mvo

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Right. I can't duplicate that. However, I suspect, b/c I think I heard
something about this, that it may be a setting in Firefox. Like I said,
most people who copy from the web instead of saving the webpage *don't* want
the formatting, and I vaguely think Firefox might have a preference to copy
text only. But I know nothing about Firefox to tell you how to check that.
The first test would be to see whether you can copy with formatting into
TextEdit or AppleWorks, that would tell you whether it's Word's pasting or
Firefox's copying where the formatting gets lost.

Your Office X is out of date, by the way:
http://word.mvps.org/macWordNew/update.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

What I meant by "how do you tell Word to copy" was do you use the menu or
cmd-V, on the chance the keyboard shortcut might have been reassigned.

Daiya

 

[John McGhie]

Sorry, I do not have Word X here to try this on.

However, it sounds as though you are not using Open Web Page from the Web
toolbar. It's a different command from File>Open and does a different
thing.

1) "Open Web Page" from the Web toolbar causes Microsoft Word to open the
URL itself.

2) "File>Open" causes the system to hand the URL off to your default
browser which opens the URL instead of Word.

To get all of the formatting, you have to use the first method, from the Web
toolbar.

There's something in the back of my mind about Word X using components of
Internet Explorer to handle web pages. I seem to remember that if you
changed your default browser, while the file would be handed out to your
default browser OK, the result would not be handed back to Word, because the
other browsers do not know to do that.

In Word 2004, Word itself will open the URL if you specify the URL using the
Web toolbar. If you specify it using the standard toolbar, Word hands the
URL off to the browser and does not ask for it back.

Hope this helps

Hi John,

Firstly thanks very much for your reply.

I tried what you suggested but the URL keeps opening in my
browser(Firefox) instead of Word (Word X Office Release 1).

Mvo

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 4 1209 1410