We have received several letters from readers regarding the use of MS Word files with their eNews Builder newsletter.  Here are a couple that seemed to express the common concerns regarding this topic with some additional tips. 

Question #1:  When I upload Word files into the HTML enabled window, much of my basic formatting gets destroyed or completely ignored.  This makes a lot of extra work for me because I have to go back through the articles fixing all of the many font and hyperlink color changes that occur for each article in every issue that I publish. What are you thoughts about these problems that I encounter every month?

Answer:   Your experience with uploading Word documents is not uncommon and it has to do with the fact that a lot of the document-oriented formatting in Word is not entirely compatible with the HTML format.  I can offer a couple of suggestions that might help, though.

First, try copying your Word content into the HTML editor instead of uploading.  This can hold the formatting better sometimes.  Also, make sure that the style drop-down in Word is always set to "normal" or "body text."  Using the other styles in Word can cause problems when you try to work with the content in HTML.

Finally, to clean up your fonts and hyperlink styles, try using the Code Sweeper located in the lower left of your HTML editor.  Do it once and select "span tags," and if that doesn't help do it again and select "font tags."  This will reset all of your fonts to the default you've defined in your template. 

Question #2: Your column is always really helpful, so thanks for the tips. Since we are on the topic of article help, I thought it would be the perfect time to get help with those dang bullets. I can NEVER (literally never) make them work in the HTML editor. So then what usually happens is I cut and paste them from Word, which creates XML, which creates problems later when I am saving an issue as a PDF. Help!

Answer:   I agree, doing bullets in HTML can be a real headache, whether you copy them from Word or try to create them in the editor.  One way I've gotten around it in the past is by using the special character that looks like a bullet instead.  The special characters button in the editor is located at the top, next to the anchor button, and it looks like a little horseshoe.