PDD Tip of the Week

How to use Microsoft Word with Blogger

Here's the situation: for whatever reason, you want to write your PDD posts first in MS Word, then copy & paste them into Blogger. The problem is that after you publish your post, you discover that all of the formatting is screwed up, and all of the punctuation has turned to garbage.

Well, there is a way around that. This is the way it works, with Windows XP at least.

First, write your post in MS Word. Then, click File > Save As. Go to the Save As Type menu at the bottom of the window, choose Plain Text(*.txt) and click Save.

A File Conversion window will then open. Make a check mark in the box that says Allow Character Substitution. This will change all of your fancy punctutation (curly quotes and the like) to plain HTML-friendly punctuation. Click OK.

Finally, go to wherever you saved the Text document and open it. It should open in Notepad. Now you can copy & paste your post into Blogger.

There are probably other ways to do this, too, and the method will certainly be different with older or different versions. But this might help some of you who like to work on your posts for longer-than-average periods