I belong to an email critique group for writers.
As we all probably know, MSWord is all about codes, so if you try to copy and paste into an email you get some funny symbols in places and it makes it very hard to read.
How can you remove the coding so the contents of a document can be copy and pasted into an email?


I have Word 2003.

thanks! Meenie

Hi Meenie,
I'm sure i don't know what you mean by "MSWord is all about codes". And whether you get "funny symbols in places" really depends on what it is you're pasting.

Perhaps you could give more detail ...

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I'm a writer and I belong to a critique group. We send each other sections of our writing to look over and offer suggestions on. Most of us write in MS Word and when we copy and paste into an email it looks fine to us but when we send it it comes out with weird symbols in place of things like quotation marks (lots of these in dialogue), commas, apostrophes and other punctuation.

I just found this on the web that explains it and gives a suggestion on how to fix it, which I have yet to try:
Avoid Weird Formatting When Copying & Pasting Text

The other day I was watching the CNN ticker at the bottom of the screen and the sentence looked like this:

"Britney?s children get to see their mom."

Did you ever see this? This ever happen to you? It happens to me in our email marketing campaigns in two ways: When I copy text off of the blog (HTML page) to paste into my Email Canvas in VR, OR when I write the blog first in Microsoft Word, then copy and paste directly into the blog.
What's happening is that Microsoft Word inserts strange characters that replace quotes, dashes and apostrophes like the one example above. Also, if you're copying and pasting right from a web page you may be taking some HTML code you don't necessarily see.
What can you do?
1. If You Use Word - Then copy your item from Word. Go to the area you want to paste the copy into in your Email Canvas and highlight it. Then click on the "paste from Word" symbol in the toolbar that looks like this: and a screen with a large text field will appear. Paste your text into the screen and click Insert. You may have to choose a font and a size but you won't get any weird characters or formatting.
2. If You Don't Use Word - Paste your text into Notepad if you're on a PC or in TextEdit if you're on a Mac. Then copy and paste your copy into your web document.
Hope this helps, it sure helped me!

Hi Meenie,

OK, what you're described is the result of Word using characters that are not supported by the email program concerned (or at least not as its currently configured). Word is not inserting the codes & symbols you're referring to. Rather, your email software is converting characters it can't handle properly. Most likely, the problem characters are Unicode characters and your email software can only handle ASCII characters.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I'm at a bit of a disadvantage here at work, I have outlook and when I copy and paste from word into outlook and send it, there's no problem. If I were sending it outside of work to someone who doesn't have Outlook, there may be - I don't know

But at home, where I do my writing, I am sending on Windows Messaging and others on the writing list have many different emails, but everyone seems to have trouble with things pasted from Word.

Do you know if there is any solution for this?

I don't seem to have that icon suggested in the blurb I pasted above ( ) but maybe that's because Outlook can handle Word?

Hi Meenie,

Since you're writing in Word, why not simply send the Word document as an attachment? That has potential benefits if you save the document with change tracking switched on. Since it gives your contributors the opportunity to edit the document and for you to see what they've changed in the returned document. Alternatively, without using change tracking, you can use Word's merge documents feature to combine your original with the returned ones and see what's been changed. Just my 2¢ worth.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Trust me, I'd much rather attach the document, but they won't allow attachments, it has to be in the body of the email. I also tried to get them to just make folders that you could upload to, but no - too "difficult" for them, lol. (This is a Writing group through yahoo)

Hi
May I suggest you first save the Word file as a text file and then copy and paste from the text file. This may resolve your issue.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards

Tony