Copying & Pasting from Word to Moodle

Just an reminder to avoid copying from MS Word and pasting into a Moodle course. Microsoft Word is notorious for including bits of formatting code that wreak havoc on web pages. We have seen a number of issues crop up recently in LBCC Moodle courses, including a pop-up like this that appears when a user tries to go to a course start page:



Imagine being the Instructor whose course delivered the above pop-up, and emailed us, saying "All of a sudden most of my moodle site disappeared. I can see only week 1 and 2. I can jump to later weeks but they are not visible." As you can imagine, this could throw some of your students into a near-panic. This is a known issue that is much easier to avoid than to diagnose and fix after-the-fact.

I have seen this happen with text copied from Word for Windows and Mac, so the best solution for Word users is to copy from Word and paste into Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit or Bean (Mac), and then from there into a Moodle text input box to appear in assignments, forums, Moodle web pages, etc.. You will lose any text formatting you incorporated into the Word version of your document (I have had success keeping formatting from Bean documents!), but any effort spent to reformat your text in Moodle itself is much easier than fixing the issue that pasted Word text can do to your Moodle course. I drafted the copy for this forum post in Word and copied/pasted from Bean - it looks great, huh?

This issue has been a big reason I shy away from Word, and use Bean and Google Docs more and more.

As always, comments and questions are welcome!