It was with interest that I read some time ago from a blog post that posting directly from Microsoft Word to a blog or Facebook can have unpredictable and undesired funny results.
As many people may be using Microsoft Word for writing articles or editing, probably because the app helps in checking spelling and grammar and also to count the number of words in an article without manual counting, there is a tendency to post the edited articles directly into blogs. In such cases, especially in the visual mode, there is a possibility the article will carry with it the formatting code used by the program along with it and will not be visible.
I did not take it seriously, as I always use the HTML mode and I can always see the coding/ HTML that goes into the blog post. But the writer of the article claimed that even in HTML mode, there will be some codes associated with formatting in Microsoft Word, and carried to the posts and reappearing when re-posting, exporting/ importing, or re-tweeting.
I have noticed it happening while posting to the good old MS FrontPage that I used to use for HTML editing. And today a funny thing happened while I was sharing an interesting article I found on a friend’s blog on poverty in New York City to Facebook. After that I just posted an excerpt that I edited in Microsoft Word as my review to my Facebook post.
The words I posted were only:
Approximately 1.4 million New Yorkers rely on soup kitchens and food pantries. Please don’t make them beg
And what went into the Facebook box was a huge chunk of 17,330 characters/ 1272 words, instead of only 105 characters/ 17 words. See the entire code to format 17 words in the text box below (scroll it down, it is quite huge):
Advice: If you are using Microsoft Word as an editor, before posting to blogs, or other locations, first cut and paste to a plain editor like a Notepad and from there cut and paste to wherever you want so that the embarrassing hidden code like the above will disappear.
