University of Exeter Site Manager Manual
Pasting text
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Pasting text into Site Manager from Word documents
The design and styling of the University website is created and maintained by the Web Team. The content
management system, Site Manager, is designed to allow users to add and maintain the content of their
webpages without the need to be concerned with page design, since all the styling is handled for you
centrally in the system. This includes the types, colours, sizes and spacing of fonts, lists and tables.
In order to keep the website design consistent, please do not attempt to change these styles in any way. If
you need a new way to format something please discuss it with the Web Team. We can see if it is
something that would be useful for other areas of the site as well, and set this up for you if necessary as a
style applied centrally in the system.
You should format your text using only the content editor toolbar in Site Manager’s text editor. See the
guide ‘Formatting text in Site Manager’).
However, you will run into problems when pasting content from Word documents. Microsoft Word formats
text using its own invisible code. This can then be carried through to Site Manager when text is copied and
pasted from a Word document, appearing in the underlying HTML code, although it is often non-standard
HTML code. The resulting text can look very untidy and isn’t consistent with the style of the rest of the
website.
The extra unnecessary code added to your page can make the download time for your page longer, and
may even potentially cause your page to produce errors that crash the reader’s browser.
Examples
Figure 1: Existing page in Undergraduate Study site with correct formatting
University of Exeter Web Team, January 2012
University of Exeter Site Manager Manual
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Compare this with:
Figure 2: Example of the same page content pasted directly from Word
Note the incorrectly styled subheadings and the extra spaces between paragraphs and headings. The font
style and size is also incorrect on some of the paragraphs.
You may find it difficult or impossible to fix if you are not familiar with HTML, which you are not expected to
be to use the content management system. So to avoid these problems we recommend you use the
method described below when pasting content from Word documents.
University of Exeter Web Team, January 2012
University of Exeter Site Manager Manual
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Pasting into Site Manager using the ‘Paste as plain text’ button
This is the recommended method for best results and by far the quickest, since you will have less tidying up
to do and no risk of underlying code creeping in that you cannot remove.
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Copy the text you require from your Word file and go to your content in Site Manager
Click on the ‘Paste as plain text’ button so it is highlighted:
Then press CTRL + V on the keyboard to paste your text into the content:
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This strips away all formatting to produce plain text. This will give you unformatted text, but usually
with the correct spacing, and with no unwanted Microsoft Office code.
When you have pasted your cleaned up text into Site Manager, format your headings (as Heading
2, 3, 4, etc) and paragraphs (Normal) using the drop-down formatting menu in the editor, and your
bulleted or numbered lists using the toolbar icons. This will ensure you get styling that looks
consistent with the rest of the site.
Figure 4: Formatting drop-down menu in Site Manager’s editor window
University of Exeter Web Team, January 2012
University of Exeter Site Manager Manual
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Previewing your pages
NB Always preview your pages before saving them in Site Manager, since some invisible Word code
can also be invisible in Site Manager’s WYSIWYG window, but Preview will show what it is doing to your
page layout. You can pick up on extra spaces you don’t want between paragraphs this way – if so, go back
to the Site Manager editor and remove these by deleting all the space between paragraphs and making
sure you then press return only once to insert a single paragraph break to give the correct spacing.
Lists
Bulleted and numbered lists often do not transfer well from Word documents if you paste them directly into
Site Manager, and you will find yourself having to edit them considerably to make them display correctly.
The bullets and numbers often get pasted in as characters, rather than properly formatted lists. If this is the
case, you will have to delete the bullet and number characters and use the numbered and bulleted items
buttons from the content editor toolbar to format them correctly:
Tables
We recommend that you NEVER paste tables from Word documents or any other applications.
Tables pasted from Word display very badly in your webpages and are impossible for you to rectify in Site
Manager without knowing HTML table code very well. The central style sheets handle the way tables are
displayed in the new website design, so it is important that the way tables are constructed is kept simple
and standard.
For all these reasons, we recommend tables are always created and edited using the set of table tools
available in Site Manager from the editing toolbar.
University of Exeter Web Team, January 2012