I've been using the "Word" app in Office XP and whenever I post a story it prompts me with 'Clear Word Format?' and assuming it is a necessary step, I click yes. I haven't tried no, yet. Invariably I end up needing to do some editing of paragraph breaks. Is there a tutorial on how to create a story on my PC without having to do so much work on the story on the website? Is there a formatting trick I can use with Word to make it easier to submit stories? Is there another word processing app that would work better? I have been using word to do technical writing in my IRL career so I am very comfortable with it and hate having to learn new things (unless I have to). I've also got Open Office, Microsoft Works and Adobe PDF creator I can work with. Anybody got any tips for me? I simply want to be able to write a story, copy and paste it into the submit page and wait for the comments and votes to roll in with minimum hassle. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I use Word 2010 for all my writing, including publishing to Lush without any problems at all. For Office XP, you might be able to install the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, which lets you use the xml formats - which are much cleaner than the dirty old .doc format.
Saving documents as 'Web Page, Filtered' is a good way to remove all that pesky formatting if you need to get the document out cleanly, for example if you want to stick it into Calibre to convert into eBook formats.
They are all ideas I'll give a try. I've tried emailing them to myself, PM'ing them to myself on Lush. Today I submitted a story and clicked 'Cancel' when it asked me if I wanted to clean Word format and it gave me my best results to date but I still had to fiddle with it a bit. For me, using Notepad seems to eliminate the great majority of the desired Word formatting and doesn't allow formatting of individual passages (like an italicized introductory paragraph - if I try to italicize just one paragraph, the entire document changes. I may try copy/paste to Open Office, MS Works or Word Pad. Thanks to everyone who suggested solutions. Mark.
I'm using Word 2010 (since all the various computers I use have it) and copying and pasting has worked okay for me so far. Some clean-up needed but nothing onerous. I do say "Yes" to the clean up word formatting prompt. Poppet's got a thread started about the problems she's having c&p'ing from Word 2007. Could be related, I suppose.
