I have been told that there have been a few issues with copying + pasting text from Microsoft Word for Mac 2004 into the WIKI editing window, when using Safari.
Right now, I am actually writing this WIKI post in Microsoft Word for Mac 2004. I will attempt to duplicate the issue that others have been reporting, to determine whether or not the issue is stemming from having an outdated version of Apple’s Safari, or if the issue arises when trying to paste incompatible data (special formatting, characters, or other objects) into the editing window.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the cause of the problem is actually the anomalies that Microsoft Office produces when trying to insert formatting data into a document.
Here is a bullet example:
•Bullet 1
•Bullet 2
•Bullet 3
1.Bullet 1
2.Bullet 2
3.Bullet 3
Here are some special character examples:
£
¢
¡
¥
§
¨
©
ª
«
¬
®
à
é
ó
ñ
Upon pasting the mess above me, I received the following error:
Which is the same error that everyone has mentioned. So, how then, did I paste all of this info into my WIKI?
Good ol' TextEdit saved the day. Instead of pasting the data into my editing window, I pasted it into TextEdit first (which is a rich text editor, similar to WordPad on a Windows machine). TextEdit was happy to gobble up all of my data, while it ignored all of Microsoft Word's invisible formatting data. From there, I simply did a select all, copied again, and pasted into my editing window. Save the page, and you're done.
Viola.
The other option, which you may choose, is using Mozilla Firefox. Firefox doesn't seem to paste Microsoft's formatting into its textboxes. So it is basically ignoring any data that it doesn't understand. It would be nice if Safari and the WIKI server would do that automatically, but it's basically a Microsoft Problem, anyway.
Here's my solution: Use Text Edit if you'd like to save your changes locally to your computer, INSTEAD of MS Word. You want to be using a Rich Text Editor for Web-Based documents, which will not allow you to accidentally write erroneous or proprietary formatting data into the document. Or, if you don't care about saving your WIKI articles locally, just use the editing window that is already built in to the WIKI. :)