There may come a time when you want to post an entry to the Cre­ative Nudge that is already saved as Word doc­u­ment (or some other odd for­mat, like OpenOf­fice or Pages). The prob­lem with this is that, some­times, when you paste from these other pro­grams, weird for­mat­ting comes through with the text, mak­ing it look all funky when it’s dis­played on the Nudge site. This post will tell you how to avoid that.

First of all, become famil­iar with the tool­bars avail­able to you when you’re edit­ing your posts. The first option you have is to choose between “Visual” or “HTML.” If you know what HTML is and feel com­fort­able edit­ing your posts using that method, go ahead. Most peo­ple will prob­a­bly stick with the Visual edi­tor, which is just like writ­ing in a sim­ple word processor.

You can explore all the func­tions on the tool­bar in the visual edi­tor, but one but­ton is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant. It’s the right-most but­ton in the menu; the but­ton fea­tures a bunch of lit­tle strips of col­ored squares. If you hover your mouse over it for a few sec­onds, you’ll see a lit­tle descrip­tion pop up: “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink.” Click on it.

This dis­plays the “advanced” menubar. Here you’ll find some addi­tional options, but we’re specif­i­cally inter­ested in three but­tons right in the middle.

• Paste as Plain Text
• Paste from Word
• Remove For­mat­ting

These but­tons will help you paste from out­side word pro­cess­ing pro­grams and remove all the funky for­mat­ting they put on your text. That way, your posts look “right” on the Nudge site.

Paste as Plain Text removes all for­mat­ting from what you’re past­ing, includ­ing under­lines and ital­ics. Use it at your own risk. Paste from Word removes a bunch of the crappy for­mat­ting that Microsoft Word puts onto text — there’s a lot of it, and it’s annoy­ing to remove by hand. Remove For­mat­ting is some­thing you do to text you’ve already pasted in to the Nudge edit­ing win­dow. It will clear your text of all the funny stuff that’s going on with it, and it will clean out any ital­ics, bolds, or under­lines that you’e entered.

Please, feel free to explore these tools and get to know them — and all the other fea­tures avail­able on the “Kitchen Sink” tool­bar. Enjoy!