By cschall on

I've got users who use MS Word to create monthly newsletters. They would like to put these online and they are not technically savvy so the most that I could ask them to do would be to save the documents as html/web pages. But I've tried all kinds of things and can not get content out of MS Word into drupal and still have it formatted properly. It looks awful! The only way that I have been able to do it is go from Word to Dreamweaver or notepad and then to a drupal text area and then of course the formatting is gone.

Could really use the help based on other's experiences and helping the "everyday" user put content online.

THANKS!!!!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

dempseyj’s picture

dempseyj commented

I think this would work best for you, it keeps all of Word's formatting all your users would have to do is copy all of the text in the document and paste it into the FCKEditor.

here's the link http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor

uzbekjon’s picture

uzbekjon commented

But it generates rather ugly HTML code :(

Did not work for me...

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uzbekjon’s picture

uzbekjon commented

Well, that is exactly what I do when I get content for my website. There're lots of unnecessary MS tags and really bad & ugly html code... So I copy the content to Dreamweaver then edit it and then copy/paste the html into the content.

But for user submited documents, you could have created the new node type with simply title, body text and allow attachments for this node type. Then let users to copy paste their content to the body field while adding the content AND attach the original file with node. Then, create a template file for this node type, but do not display it's body content. So that users download the file itself. Body content is used for search. Users search for the content, drupal searches the body field and gives users the attachment...

This is just the simple solution. As far as I know, there is no better way to get your MS Word content into your html than Dreamweaver -> edit -> html :)

Anyways, goodluck,
Uzbek

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Sean Buscay’s picture

Sean Buscay commented

I agree with dempseyj about fckeditor.

We have a site with 100+ very nontechnical users. They pretty much just paste their MS word docs into fckeditor and it does a good job of keeping formating.

With a little extra effort, users could be trained to use fckeditor's ms word cleanup feature which does a good job at stripping out extraneous tags but keeping the "intention" of the ms word formating.

Fckeditor can be configured to auto detect pasting of ms word formating and ask the user if they want to clean it up.

Another option, depending on what version of MS word your users are working with, they can be setup to post directly from MS word to a Drupal node. This is via the Blog API.
I have not had to support users on it yet.

Finally, if your users are used to ms word, they would also be able to use the free Windows Live publisher from Microsoft. I have tested it for posting to Drupal nodes via the Blog API. It works well, is easy for the user (once configured) and automatically uploads their images too.

Sean Buscay
www.christian-web-masters.com
www.antiochian.org

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

We've trained our users to use Contribute when they want to create full pages of content. Then we use a custom module that pulls the Contribute pages into drupal as nodes. Contribute is very MSWord-ish, so it's pretty easy to use, and with the right CSS rules, the formatting is intact inside drupal. I'm not ready to release the module into the wild yet, but if you're interested, I can email you a copy of it.

duggoff

cschall’s picture

cschall commented

I installed fckeditor and tried to copy and paste and it didn't really work. The problem is that I've got a client who wants to add newsletters to her web site and knows how to use Word. She doesn't want to learn something else. The client has all kinds of layout issues and converting 3 columns of data from Word to html is not working well at all.

I'll look at the Contribute option, but if anyone has any other experiences to share, I'd appreciate them all.

Thanks for everyone's help. At least I know that I'm not alone in this frustrating problem.

Sean Buscay’s picture

Sean Buscay commented

cschall,

If your client uses ms word, and does not want to learn anything else, then here is an option:

1. Create a node type that is for the newsletter (mswordnewsletter)
2. make a page template for just the node
----I am saying page template instead of node template, because I really just want to remove all other html and css from the page which the newseltter will print on. This will allow, just the MS word html to print, using all its funky styles and formating
3. Enable the BlogAPI on Drupal
---make sure you just allow the API to publish to the mswordnewsletter node type
4. Show the client how to save her newsletter in ms word, and then from within ms word, send it to Drupal

The other thing is, if it is just a monthly or even weekly newsletter, why not just have a recurring fee to convert it for her? I do this for a one of our site users who has a monhtly newsletter done in MS publisher. I just convert it to a pdf and post it for them.

Sean Buscay
www.christian-web-masters.com
www.antiochian.org

cschall’s picture

cschall commented

I'm trying to implement this, but I'm not familiar with blogs and have done limited templates.

I'm not sure on the distinction between a page template vs. a node template. The templates that I've created in the past have worked with flexinode content so I've got several templates for that. Are you referring to something completely different?

Does the user need to have Word 2007 to go from Word to Drupal?

Thanks for your help.

Sean Buscay’s picture

Sean Buscay commented

Regarding the version of ms word:

Word 2007 has it built in nicely.

There are some plugins for other versions of Word. I used the Blogger plugin, but don't remember if it worked with Drupal's API. I'll check.

I'll explain the template issue in more detail later. The main reason for the different template was to not have the overall template css interfere with the Word formating. You may try it and find that it does not create a problem, and there fore do not need a new template. I'll follow up soon.

Sean Buscay
www.christian-web-masters.com
www.antiochian.org

deepak.cms’s picture

deepak.cms commented

Can you please send me the link from where we can find the configuration settings for the FCK to auto detect word format?