My publisher has approved a book about the automotive industry. It is
virtually impossible to know all the facts about Henry Ford, Ransom
Olds or William Durant. Naturally I went to Google and copied dates
and material to my draft. I planned to melt that information into the
appropriate paragraphs but it went bonkers. The material I wrote is
fine but everything from Google is screwed up. In some places I just
have the URLs where the info came from and in others the material is
there but in another font. On top of everything else the editor wants
the manuscript right away.

I've tried select all / copy and then I go to a blank page and select
Paste special. That gives me about 4 choices and none of them seem to
work for me. I'm using Word 2000 on Windows 98 2nd edition.

Help! I'll gladly pay whatever you suggest.

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Request for Question Clarification by kriswrite-ga on 07 Apr 2004 12:11 PDT

Just to clarify, is the problem the formatting? (i.e. weird fonts, big
and small typefaces, colors, etc.) Or is the problem missing
information? I you have a formatting problem, I can tell you how to
fix that. Just let me know.

Regards,
Kriswrite

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Clarification of Question by captdave-ga on 08 Apr 2004 05:11 PDT

Formatting is clearly one of the problems. I think the infusion of
HTML material into a Word document creates a problem. Now I have about
50 pages I'm trying to stabilize. I believe the other things like
unbidded switching to Times New Roman will go away if I can make a
compatible document from the two sources.
Dave

Hi captdave~

Thanks for the clarification. The easiest way to get rid of all those
weird problems is to:

* SELECT ALL. (Highlight all the text.)

* Then go to the very top of the Word document. You'll see fields that
normally tell you what font you're using; if everything is
highlighted, they will probably be blank. The first of those fields is
labeled STYLE. (You should be able to see this title if you touch your
pointer to the field.) Click on that field and select CLEAR
FORMATTING.

Now everything will be in the same font, and all bolds, colors,
italics, etc. should disappear. The only thing left to do is go back
through your text and make sure all paragraphs are where they should
be, and add emphasis (like italics), as needed.

You can also try copying the entire text and pasting it into notepad
or an email, but this only works part of the time, and involves extra
steps.

Good luck with your book!

Kriswrite

RESEARCH STRATEGY:
Researcher's personal knowledge

I'm not exactly sure what kind of trouble you are having since usually
selecting "special paste" and then clicking "unformatted text" works
for me. However, if you want to do it a rough way, you could open
notepad and just paste any text you copy from the internet into
notepad, then copy it all over into your Word document. Maybe it would
help to see what sites you are trying to copy & paste from? I hope
this helps