How Prevent Weird Formatting in Your Blog Post Editor

A couple of weeks ago during Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff someone asked why her blog posts don’t appear correctly when copying from a Word document into the blog post editor. Similarly, formatting gets weird when copying from a Google Document into a blog post editor. The reason for this is that both Word and Google Docs include some additional “hidden” information along with the text that you actually see in your blog post editor.

The solution to the weird formatting problem that occurs when copying from Word or Google Docs into a blog post is to use your blog editor’s HTML or Text mode instead of the Compose or Visual mode. When you do this you’ll be inserting just text into your blog post editor. You’ll have to then manually insert any links that you want to appear in the blog post. Likewise, you’ll have to manually insert any spacing or indentations that you want to appear in the blog post.

In the following video I demonstrate how to copy text from Google Docs into Blogger and into Edublogs without creating weird formatting issues.

Applications for Education

There are some good reasons why you might be copying from Word or Google Docs into a blog post editor. One of those is having students write essays or short articles that you want to include in a classroom blog without having to give students editing access on the blog.

Another reason you might be writing a blog post in Google Docs or Word is because you’re writing where your Internet connection is spotty. For example, there’s a picnic table at a little park that I like to sit at to write when the weather in nice. The trouble is that cell phone coverage is poor there and wi-fi is completely unavailable so I’ll write in offline mode in Google Docs then copy and paste into my blog post editor when I do have Internet access.

How Prevent Weird Formatting in Your Blog Post Editor

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