Pasting from Word to Evernote - Odd formatting

[Devan 0]

Hi, 

 

I've been looking through the forums for a solution for this, and although people mention it, I cannot find any posts which are not 6mths old and solution-less.

 

I'm using Word 2011, Mac OS X 10.8.2

 

Each time I paste from a word document, with quite a lot of bullets, to Evernote the alignment and bulleting is quite messed up.

 

Attached are screenshots of what it looks like in Word, and what it looks like once pasted. I have been able to spend time to make it look a bit more correct but even still when I then look at the note on my iphone the formating is less than ideal.

 

The odd thing is that I have only recently bought this mac, and I did not have the same problem using my old PC with an older version of word. 

 

Is there any solutions on Mac OS?

 

Thanks for your help!

 

 

 

[JMichaelTX 4,118]

Wow!  That  is really bad.  EN Mac is really  s c r e w i n g  up the nice format coming from MS Word.

This is really UNACCEPTABLE.

 

What version of EN Mac are you running?

 

ATTN EN DEVELOPERS:  I suspect that at least part of the problem is that EN Mac is NOT using the HTML version that Word is putting on the Mac Clipboard.  Word probably puts several versions of the text on the Clipboard:  Plain Text, Rich Text, HTML.

 

This needs to be fixed ASAP.  We are constantly reminded that EN is NOT a  Word Processor, and IF we need more powerful WP features to use something like Word.  Well MS Word is probably the World's most popular WP.  So EN Mac should make sure that richly formatted text copied from Word will paste in EN Mac and retain the formatting, at least as represented by HTML.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

Hi, 

 

I've been looking through the forums for a solution for this, and although people mention it, I cannot find any posts which are not 6mths old and solution-less.

 

I'm using Word 2011, Mac OS X 10.8.2

 

Each time I paste from a word document, with quite a lot of bullets, to Evernote the alignment and bulleting is quite messed up.

 

Attached are screenshots of what it looks like in Word, and what it looks like once pasted. I have been able to spend time to make it look a bit more correct but even still when I then look at the note on my iphone the formating is less than ideal.

 

The odd thing is that I have only recently bought this mac, and I did not have the same problem using my old PC with an older version of word. 

 

Is there any solutions on Mac OS?

 

Thanks for your help!

 

Hi. Welcome to the forums. Thanks for bringing up this topic. You might want to try a few alternative formats. For example, save the file as an .rtf file and see what happens, or save it as a Web page and see what happens. I think ideally you would want to copy/paste straight from the file, but for now, an alternative format might be a nice workaround.

 

Could you share the file with us so that we can test it out? 

[Devan 0]

Thanks for the responses so far.

 

I should have mentioned in my searching on the forums I have already tried saving it as:

 - Old .doc formats (1997-2004)

 - Rich text format files (.rtf)

 - PDF

 - Web based files (.html)

 

None of these options seem to work, they basically paste in exactly the same way (or worse). The EN version I am using is just the latest, only downloaded yesterday.

 

Here is a copy of the actual file: https://hotfile.com/dl/195603946/b1fbd06/Renal_3_Chronic_Kidney_Injury.docx.html

 

You may have noticed from the screenshot that it pastes with the bullet off the page to the left - really quite odd. Even when I manually formatted it all over by moving things to the right and cleaning it up, when I look at it on my iphone (which is the main reason I use EN) it is still a bit messed up.

 

Here are four photos to demonstrate this. The first two are showing the MANUALLY cleaned up paste from my mac. The indenting with the bullets is still not right & the bullet points are a weird symbol.  The second two show how good it was pasteing from my PC only a couple of weeks ago. 

https://hotfile.com/dl/195604921/2b0d040/Archive.zip.html

 

 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

Thanks for the responses so far.

 

I should have mentioned in my searching on the forums I have already tried saving it as:

 - Old .doc formats (1997-2004)

 - Rich text format files (.rtf)

 - PDF

 - Web based files (.html)

 

None of these options seem to work, they basically paste in exactly the same way (or worse). The EN version I am using is just the latest, only downloaded yesterday.

 

Here is a copy of the actual file: https://hotfile.com/dl/195603946/b1fbd06/Renal_3_Chronic_Kidney_Injury.docx.html

 

You may have noticed from the screenshot that it pastes with the bullet off the page to the left - really quite odd. Even when I manually formatted it all over by moving things to the right and cleaning it up, when I look at it on my iphone (which is the main reason I use EN) it is still a bit messed up.

 

Here are four photos to demonstrate this. The first two are showing the MANUALLY cleaned up paste from my mac. The indenting with the bullets is still not right & the bullet points are a weird symbol.  The second two show how good it was pasteing from my PC only a couple of weeks ago. 

https://hotfile.com/dl/195604921/2b0d040/Archive.zip.html

 

Something weird seems to be going on with that file, because the bullets are not acting like they ought to inside the Word file. Try deleting the first bullet, for example, or switching views. I wish I knew more about Word to say what is happening. It might well be an incompatibility, and hopefully Evernote staff will look into it. Thanks again for reporting! I will flag this for the developers. 

 

Anyhow, for this particular document, File > Web Page Preview seems to get it to copy/paste correctly. 

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/90a03c05-a74c-46dc-9e9e-cd02ef8a4ec3/ea8c30dd8586185d2d8723a1018cd9e1

[Devan 0]

Thanks Grumpy! Web Page Preview does indeed seem to work a LOT better, formatting is basically perfect! Funnily enough that was the only option I had NOT tried!

 

The only thing that remains a problem is that the square bullet doesn't appear correctly when you look at it on the iphone - it remains the odd symbol of two S. Its quite a minor issue but is made worse by the fact that the alternate circe bullet becomes really tiny when you copy it through web page preview - basically a period dot lol. Would love a normal bullet!!

 

 

 

ps. The word file seems to work completly fine on my system.. so not sure what thats about.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

Thanks Grumpy! Web Page Preview does indeed seem to work a LOT better, formatting is basically perfect! Funnily enough that was the only option I had NOT tried!

 

The only thing that remains a problem is that the square bullet doesn't appear correctly when you look at it on the iphone - it remains the odd symbol of two S. Its quite a minor issue but is made worse by the fact that the alternate circe bullet becomes really tiny when you copy it through web page preview - basically a period dot lol. Would love a normal bullet!!

 

 

 

ps. The word file seems to work completly fine on my system.. so not sure what thats about.

Glad I could help. I've passed on the file and the problem to the OSX developers, so hopefully it will improve in the future.

[Jackolicious 808]

Thanks for posting this.  On it.

[KKoyle 0]

Thanks for this discussion, it's very helpful.

 

The bottom line is that EN really needs to work on the formatting incompatibilities between Word and EN, especially EN installed on Apple products.  Every day I use EN on my iPad to take notes during meetings at work, and while I love the convenience and features of EN, I am consistently frustrated by formatting problems.  Most of my meetings are run according to agendas that are distributed ahead of time as MS Word documents, usually in outline or bullet formats.  I can generally copy and paste these to EN on my desktop computer, either using the online or desktop app version of EN, without much trouble, but when I open the files on my iPad during the meetings, it all falls apart.  I try to add a new bullet or topic in the middle of the outline, and the formatting is off.  I try to delete or edit a bullet line the agenda, and I end up with blank, numbered lines that I can't delete.  The fonts change, the numbering is inconsistent, etc.  I understand that Microsoft and Apple don't always play nice together, but Microsoft Office is the most common office productivity software package in the world, and iPad is the most common and popular tablet.  We users rely on systems like Evernote to bridge the gap between the two.  Please help us!

[tomtilson 0]

The only solution that I found was to paste the Mac Word document into EN (with the resulting left side of each sentence out of sight off to the left) and then block the text and go to Formatting and click on "Simplify Formatting."