Comments on: MsoNormal – What the Heck is Microsoft Doing with HTML?

By: John H. Gohde

John H. Gohde — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:48:00 +0000

Use the Paste Options Button on Micrsoft products. Or, paste and cut from any plain text editor (a pretty rare animal outside of NotePad.)

is the same as

By: Fix Microsoft Outlook’s Broken HTML Rendering : EveryJoe - Sports News - Tech Reviews - Entertainment - Life Tips for EveryJoe

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:38:46 +0000

[...] If you’ve ever done any web development, you’ve probably realized that HTML that’s created by Microsoft Word and the old Microsoft Frontpage application was loaded w…. [...]

By: Rodrigo Penalba

Rodrigo Penalba — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 08:42:39 +0000

In Wordpress there are two buttons to control how you paste MS Word text.

They do look like the regular PASTE button, but the first one has a TXT icon next to it. It opens a pop-up window and let’s you paste any MS Word text as just text, even respecting existing breaklines.

The second button is for pasting MS Word texts, and maintains all the format coming from MS Word, including the evil MSO NORMAL.

By: Mark Lee

Mark Lee — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:44:59 +0000

Thanks for this – at least I now know I can ignore all that rubbish that I’ve spotted gets copied when I cut and paste.

By: Jason Bean

Jason Bean — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:50:00 +0000

I either do one or a couple of different things. If I do have something written in a Microsoft Word program that I want to paste into a web form, I’ll paste it into Notepad first, then copy it from there and paste it into the web form. If I don’t do that, then I don’t use Word or anything to type up my original posts.

By: Nan

Nan — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:37:34 +0000

So this means I shouldn’t be writing in Microsoft WORKS and doing a copy and paste onto eBay and emails as I have been doing? What software do you suggest using instead? I guess I have to plead guilty to contributing a lot of trash code! My boss is in the process of upgrading his commercial website and I think he has been doing this also.
Thanks for your postings!

By: Jason Bean

Jason Bean — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:03:09 +0000

Nan, the key is pretty much don’t ever cut and paste anything out of Microsoft Word or any other Microsoft program and paste it into a form that accepts HTML code. Anything like an online email message.

By: Nan

Nan — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:33:25 +0000

I came searching for info on MsoNormal because it showed up in my spell checker when I was forwarding an email story with a picture and sound. I cannot see it anyplace in the email so I was wondering if it was malicious and likely to cause problems. I am NOT a programmer so even after reading the above posts,
I am still not sure! I don’t know how to get to the “source code” and if I did tamper with it, I would no doubt “fix” it beyond repair!
Any advice for this simple minded seeker?

By: Brian Layman

Brian Layman — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:06:41 +0000

test (please ignore)

By: Brian Layman

Brian Layman — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:39:37 +0000

And WordPress too. Now you understand why we don’t recommend pasting in from Word without using that function.

Microsoft started doing stuff like this way back in 95 with their first FrontPage release. You would have thought with everyone being on dial up they would have wanted to optimize the site source a bit, but obviously, that was not foremost in their plans.