Pasting Content from Word Might Present Challenges
DecisionDirector's response editor supports pasting content from MS-Word and other text editors. Using the Paste from Word function is usually sufficient to provide a good result, one that appears as desired both on-line in DecisionDirector as well as in a generated Word document.
Sometimes, though, the result is not great. Formatting might be off, excessive space between paragraphs might appear, and images are not where they should be. This is typically due to styling and unseen formatting within the original Word document content.
If time permits, this can often be remedied by reviewing and simplifying the styles and formatting used in the Word document. But, we understand that time rarely permits, and so we have found a quick work-around that has been helpful to us and might be helpful to you.
Avoid Heading Styles
The most common challenge occurs when the pasted content from a Word document contains text or paragraphs that are stylized with Headings (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on). The presence of heading styles in pasted content will throw off the numbering in the generated Word document. This will be confusing to the client. It is best to replace headings with Normal text that has Bold or other basic font styles applied.
A Decent Workaround
If you are struggling with getting formatted content into the DecisionDirector response editor, to produce the cleanest, most space-efficient result in DecisionDirector and the generated Word document, follow these steps:
- In the original Word document, change paragraph formatting to use Auto spacing before and after.
- Remove now extraneous paragraph marks.
- Easiest to use CTRL-H to replace all occurrences of two paragraph marks (^p^p) with one paragraph mark (^p).
- Copy desired text, paste into www.wordhtml.com editor.
- Easiest to use the table editor in wordhtml to place borders around the table cells. Click on the table, choose the Table Properties icon from the mini-toolbar that is presented, and enter “1” in the Border field.
- Copy from Word HTML editor and paste into DD.
- Images will not be copied.
- Copy images, paste into DD.
- Select and copy image from Word document and paste into desired location in DD.
- Click on image to highlight it, the right click on image and select Properties.
- To set image alignment, click on lower right corner of Image Alignment field to reveal alignment options. Select desired option.
- To set border, click on Border Color field and choose color, then enter “1” in Border Width. Click Ok.
Note: Bulleted lists within tables are not presented within the generated document as compactly as they would if manually created, which means they take up additional space in the document. Given some of the page constraints and the volume of information to be conveyed by the vendor, remedial options include inserting an image of such tables, or reformatting the text to be presented without a table.
