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Tech Bleg
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009I’m trying to paste a bunch of web articles into a big Word document.
Problem is, when you cut and paste from the web into Word on a Mac, it strips out all the formatting. Paragraphs still look good, but hyperlinks, italics, bold, etc. disappear.
Anyone know a good workaround?
Are you going to Edit–>Paste Special–>HTML format? I just tried it and it worked for me.
Google docs keeps link and such.
Google Docs preserves html formatting (so you can cut and paste from a website) and can the export as a varity of formats (including .doc and pdf).
Its effective, useful (and free). Although there are some privacy concerns if you’re just moving stuff that’s on the web anyway this shouldn’t matter.
You need the new Mac Wheel. I understand that with only a few hundred clicks, you can paste text with all that formatting in place.
You could also try to save the page and open it (and/or append the file) in Word to see if that works better for you.
Another trick…may take a few more steps, but usually…most of the time for me, anyway:
1. Save page as “Web Page, complete”
2. Open html file in word
3. save file as a word doc
I’m sorry, I didn’t see that it was on a Mac, I’m on a PC.
Thanks for the tips.
Google Docs saves formatting, but cuts out paragraph breaks. That’s better, but still not ideal.
That might just be to some quirk in the way Reason articles render.
Unfortunately, my project involves Reason articles.
OpenOffice.org
Buy a PC? ;)
Try EverNote:
http://evernote.com/about/what_is_en/tour/mac.php
Holy Cr@p! I’ve been reading Radley for years, and he’s a Mac user? I had no idea!
I feel… dirty…
Use Pages instead of Word. I just tried pasting a random article from the Reason website (“Practical Reasons Why Stimulus Spending Doesn’t Work”) into Pages ’09, and the formatting came through just fine.
with all the other word processors, you don’t use Word, do you?
Like the first poster said, if you paste in HTML format it should work.
Are you copying out of Safari or Mozilla? I think Mozilla will preserve the links, etc as part of the clipboard object.
Radley,
You can do it in word using the “Paste Special” command in Word. It will give you a menu of opitons – select “HTML Format” and you should be golden. Works on Word 97 and up.
Oh, and the “Paste Special” command is found on the Edit menu.
Open Office.org does it flawlessly. At least on any Debian based Linux distribution. I’ve undertaken similar projects, and I managed to do it without any of the issues you’re describing in Ubuntu, Mandrake, and Debian using OOo.
OOo doesn’t come with a desktop publishing app, but with a little more work, I was able to make OOo Writer function in a way that was almost exactly like MS Publisher, and I formatted the archived articles into tabloid size pages for publishing in a newspaper.
I meant to add that I can’t imagine that OOo would work any differently on a Mac than it does in Linux.
Guess, you got the message. Toss MS Word overboard.
What I do is select all, then copy and paste into an email I send to myself with my Gmail account. When you look at that message later, the formating remains correct and the links still work. This is perfect for Order Confirmations, shopping carts you haven’t checkout yet, or other temporary webpages you want to save, but don’t want to print. And it makes finding them later simple.
TacticalJack :
Guess, you got the message. Toss MS Word overboard.
Word.
Perhaps you need to update your copy of Office.
Pasting works fine from Safari 3.2.1 to Word 12.1.5.
no. deal with it.
Try Safari. Copy/paste with formatting works for me in Safari and not Firefox.
“You need the new Mac Wheel. I understand that with only a few hundred clicks, you can paste text with all that formatting in place.”
I was playing Metal Gear Solid 4 (a video game) a night or two back when I discovered that the protagonist had an iPod in his possession. Apparently it’s a fully licensed iPod that behaves just like the real deal (with a wheel that doubles as a directional pad and has a button in the middle). The PS3 analog stick controls the virtual device (rotate for the wheel, push the stick in a direction for the directions and push the stick in for the central button). What an incredibly annoying interface.
Try clicking “page source” under “view” in your browser. Then copy and paste the html code.