Ever try to copy something from Microsoft Word and paste into a blog or web-mail app, and have all these odd characters show up where you had quotations, bullets, or ellipsis?

That's because Word uses extended character fonts that look good when printed, but paint-text apps just do not understand what they are supposed to be. For years I've had to go through a tedious process of exporting and importing my Word docs just to get some clean ASCII text to use when blogging, posting resumes, or sending mail.

After much searching for a soultion, I decided to make my own Macro in Word that does the conversion for me. It works very simply: just highlight the text I want, and select Copy as TXT from the Edit menu. The results can be pasted into anything, and looks correct!

Interested? Here's how to do it!

Microsoft has gotten so beat up over Macro viruses that they have virtually locked out any easy way of making and distributing macros and modifications to Office apps. Can't say I blame them, I've got burned too many times myself. So instead of giving you an installation routine and having you worry if you might be installing something evil, I've opted to just give you the code and instructions on how to make your own macro.

Plus, this way I don't have to worry about anyone emailing me and saying 'My PC acts weird now, and it all started when I installed your Macro!' ;)

There are two links at the bottom. Both files have exactly the same info, they are just in different formats.

The Word Doc has the instructions on how to create a global macro and add it to the Edit menu. This is the best option, because you can just copy the Macro code from within the document and paste it into the editor. The document itself have NO MACROS attached. These instructions show you how to customize the template file Word uses to control it's own appearance, so the files you create will NOT have macros attached to them.

For the truly paranoid, use the PDF link. You'll have to type in the macro code yourself, but that's the price of being really paranoid.

Microsoft Word document: Download

PDF document: Download