I’m sure we have all done this in the past, written something up in MS word, then just copied and pasted it in to a webform, such as the product description on your eshop, clicked save and merrily gone on your way confident that all is fine. I know I have. There is a problem though, sometime when you go back and check your store front it looks HORRIBLE, or the text just is not there, generally just not very good.
The way I see it is that there are 2 solutions to this problem. Firstly, copy and paste your text into a simple notepad application, personally I really like GVim (This can be downloaded free from http://www.vim.org/), but you can use any simple text editor. This solution works for most web applications including your blogs.
Secondly, in your 123-reg eShop, when your adding your content you can use the built in text editor and it will take the formatting correctly, and not mess up your page formatting.
It is one of the most common customer queries posed to the 123-reg.co.uk support team about the eCommerce package: content inserted in the back office is not displayed in the storefront. Oddly enough, this issue happens only with Internet Explorer; all other browsers work flawlessly.
Why does this happen?
This “error” is a result of the interplay between Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer. More specifically, the problem occurs as follows. If you use MS Word to create and format texts, then this popular word-processing programme uses its own type of invisible formatting commands’ to underline or boldface, for example. Although these commands are similar to HTML formatting commands (e.g. as they are used to display website content), the MS Word formatting commands are not compatible with Internet Explorer. If you copy the texts created and formatted in Word and use the editor to insert them into your shop, then all the formatting commands will be transferred and added in the editor likewise invisibly. This then causes display errors in of all browsers Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
The solution to this problem
If the display errors occur in Internet Explorer (you could switch to Chrome or FireFox 🙂 ), go back to the page in your back office. Select the Data Sheet mode so that you can see the texts’ formatting commands. You can access Data Sheet mode via the General/Description tab. Delete the formatting commands which had been copied out of Microsoft Word. Then switch to the editor and graphically modify the texts in accordance with your preferences.