Why do I have to use a special paste when pasting from Word?

Copying and Pasting text into the editor is an easy and convenient way to add content to your webpages; however, it brings with it some problems, especially if you are using Microsoft based applications to create the text.

Microsoft applications (Word, Powerpoint, Publisher, etc.) add a lot of extraneous code to the text created and formatted within the program. This code remains "stuck" to the text when pasting into the editor. This extraneous code is not useful at all in the editor, nor on the web. It is invisible on the webpage; however, it can cause problems such as inconsistency in the output of your final page, due to the way different platforms read code.

To combat these problems, it is recommended that you use either the "Paste From Word"  or "Plain Paste" . In most situations, the Plain Paste is the recommended paste.

For more information about pasting, check out Cut, Copy, and Paste.