The View From Wisconsin

(or, "Why I hate Office 2007 So Much")

Microsoft wanted to make their newest Office package easy to integrate into the world of web publishing, so they changed things so that Word's basic file extension, .docx, would essentially become an XML-based web document.

Only one little problem: even if your document was saved as a previous version of Word (the tried-and-true .doc extension, for example), if you try to copy-and-paste from Word to Blogger or any other online HTML-based text editing program, you get HTML errors up the wazoo.

For example: when I paste a simple line from a box score that I was editing in Word '07, this is what it looks like in code format:

(EDIT: I couldn't even get the bleepin' thing to work enough to post!)

What it should look like is this:

Power-play Conversions: NAS - 1 of 4; CHI - 0 of 6. Attendance: 16,802. Goalies: Chicago, Huet (37 shots, 34 saves). Nashville, Rinne (35 shots, 34 saves). Referees: Eric Furlatt, Greg Kimmerly. Linesmen: Jonny Murray, Tim Nowak.

To get it to look like that, I have to copy the text into Wordpad or Notepad, then paste it to Blogger.

Anyone who knows how to get around this annoyance, please - let me know.