Question

I am struggling to get an accurate answer on this questions on whether TinyMCE supports pasting from Microsoft word. I guess there may be a lot of out of date information on the web on this topic as I have seen answers such as:

1. There is a plugin you can install to get it to work
2. You have to use a separate “paste from word” button as opposed to pasting in the editor
3. it should work fine out of the box
4. it doesn’t work at all (no matter what you do)

I have tested this and it doesn’t seem like it works out of the box (answer #3) but I am not sure if this is due to a configuration / initialization issue on my side or there is some other external thing needed.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It does indeed work (as well as it can). You will need to use the “paste from Word” button, though, so TinyMCE can filter any of the extraneous markup that Word adds to its content. You’ll also have to make sure the paste plugin (which is part of the the default install) is loaded.

I believe that you’ll need to explicitly add the button in your theme, though. Take a look at this example from the TinyMCE wiki.

plugins : "paste",
theme_advanced_buttons3_add : "pastetext,pasteword,selectall",

will add the plugin and button (to whichever row you’d like). The TinyMCE wiki claims paste does Word filtering by default, but I’ve never seen it work in the wild without explicitly using the “paste from Word” button.