Quicksand Fans

Is there any way, if I am posting a story on Stories, that I can import a WORD file onto the text of the post? Right now, I only know that I can attach a WORD file, or I can type the story originally into the post. I think it flows better to have the story right in the post, rather than attaching the file. However, I have a couple of stories on a memory stick in WORD that I would like to import, if it is possible. I am technically challenged and am just asking.

I'm pretty sure that the best way to do this is 'copy' (text) from the Word document, and then 'paste' it into the forum post.

You can highlight text in the Word document by clicking and dragging over it with your mouse, or by doing an edit - select all.

There's probably a limit as to how much text you can paste into a post, but I'll bet it's pretty generous.

Dave

Dave - thank you for the advice - I will try it.

A story that I posted here some time back was first written in a Word document (or some type of wordprocessing program) then cut and pasted into the post.

As Dave noted, you can post only a certain amount of text into the post, thus needing to use two or more successive posts for a long story. The trick is trying to get all of the story posted on the successive posts before someone comments, thus breaking up the sequence. One idea is to figure out how much of your story you can place into one post, break the story out in equal portions that fit the post space limits then start posting successive portions of the story one right after the other. It's been a while since I did this, but I believe I posted the first portion of the story then hit "Reply" to post the next portion and so on.

One draw back to cutting and pasting is if you used any special features, such as bold, italics, underline, or centering of text in the Word document, none of those features transfer over when you paste into the post (at least I haven't figured out how to do it). Thus, if you still want those features in your story as a post, you'll have to go back into the post to edit it and replace those features using the special features available in the post program. This takes time and can be worth the effort for adding emphasis to areas of your story. I don't think you can center text on the forum post... at least I haven't figured out how. I also recommend for long stories requiring mutiple posts that you post the story (and its multiple parts) first then edit to avoid the sequence from being interrupted by another member's comments.

Hope that helps.

Here's something that might help, though it is a bit on the technical side: http://www.onlinehowto.net/Tutorials/Vi ... Bcode/1511. It's basically a VB script you can run from within MSWord to convert the file to BBCode, the specialized markup language used with most BB systems today.

Ah, most interesting. Thanks for sharing that!

Dang it...seems to me I did this at Deep Sinking...posted a story inline with bolds and italics...but now I'm thinking that I did a search-and-replace from HTML the the codes that work here.

I would advise against uploading Word documents here. Not that you can't, but I once downloaded a Word document from Deep Sinking and got author information with it that I'm pretty sure the author didn't intend to share.

She said she was a girl but the owner of the program was a man.

I believe you can turn that on and off but if you don't know where it is, keep the text in your posts until Nessie gets around to running some more tests with her new Word For Mac to see if she can duplicate the error.

I never in fact learnt Word thoroughly, which is a career misstep that I am now trying to rectify.

Nessie

I did not expect the multiple sources of help - thank you. I have to wade through WORD and try some of these things out. Ideally, I would just type the stories onto the thread, but it doesn't work that way. I get 500 hits with an attached WORD file, but only 209 downloads of the story. I would like to have each hit be a potential reader. Thanks for all of your suggestions.

Nessie wrote:She said she was a girl but the owner of the program was a man.

What in fact means nothing. The users may customize their M$Office or not, they may use WinWord registered at their office, they may use WinWord registered by another family member or friend, they finally can download WinWord from, as you use to say, Russian warez site, where such WinWord is already cracked (so that it doesn't demand any registration) and registered at some unknown or even nonexistent business and/or person.

However, I agree that WinWord documents contain some information which many users have no idea of how to check, edit, or delete. Too bad for them