Keep Word Formatting and Paste to GMail

Keep Word Formatting and Paste to GMail

In this tutorial, we address the occasional need to compose email with more professional and organized formatting. One could argue that formatting options already exist for GMail -- but keep in mind that these are rarely used, and true email drafting and formatting usually happens in Microsoft Word!

This tutorial aims to help you in fighting with paragraph indents, bullets and numbering, and even the simple boldface, underline, and italics font display that is often times lost or altered when pasting from Word to GMail.

Below is a screenshot of a sample Word document


Doing a simple copy this text..



And now before clicking the Paste command..
**Notice that there is an option in Google Chrome to "Paste as Plain Text". As anyone would, seeing that option tells us that it would most likely copy and paste only the text contents of the clipboard. -- And indeed it does!

However, seeing that we do not specifically use this option to paste content, we assume that the Copy-Paste would go well..



And now, instant copy-paste formatting disaster!



Notice the formatting elements that have been lost:

FONT!
One could argue that there is no universal font -- except maybe for Times New Roman, Arial, and Comic Sans!
Except for the fact that, for different operating systems and version of MS Office, these fonts do not display exactly the same. Some fonts, even though they are very much common and familiar, are not even named the same in versions of Windows and MAC operating systems.



PARAGRAPH or NEXT-LINE BREAKS!
Paragraph or next-line or simply most kinds of next line spacing is lost or altered.



BULLETS and NUMBERING!
Its not the easiest thing to mess with Word's bullet and auto-number formatting. Sometimes its best to keep things in plain bullets instead of numbers to better accommodate new line inserts. But doing a simple copy paste from Word to your email isn't that simple when bullet spacing and indention is lost.



One can indeed adapt to using the builtin GMail formatting tools..

But this is only useful if you are composing first and not pasting.


============================================

Now onto the solution!

On Microsoft Word, click File -- Save As -- and select the type as Web Page / HTM


Use Google Chrome to open the created .HTM file


Google Chrome seems to have kept most of the Word formatting! Lets continue on!


On Google Chrome, copy the text..


And finally, paste into GMail!



There you have it!

Comparing the original Word formatting..



With our GMail output in Google Chrome