If you have ever used the standard Rich Text editor when editing SharePoint wikis and blogs, you know how painful certain operations can be. In particular, it is painful to add images and copy formatted text from another source into the blog/wiki.

The Word editor for wikis is very helpful as many of you have probably found. It is available in the Admin Links on a blog site. The link is entitled "Launch blog program to post". I use Word 2007 and haven't looked back, so I'm not sure if this feature is only available with Word 2007, but I suspect that it is. Another editor that we posted about in the past is the r.a.d. editor for MOSS 2007 from Telerik.

One particular benefit of the Word editor above the standard Rich Text editor is ease of formatting and the ability to add images. Without such an editor adding images involves first adding the image to a picture library then creating a link to the item through the standard Rich Text editor. Unfortunately, I have only seen the Word editor available for blogs and not wikis or simple Rich Text fields in custom lists.

Even with the Word editor, there is a problem in formatting some text. On our Technical Blog I sometimes like to show code snippets. When I copy code from Visual Studio 2005 into my Word blog editor, it looks just fine. However, once I publish a draft, the blog shows an empty line between each line of code like so:

Trying to get rid of this through the Rich Text editor involves getting into the HTML source and changing <P> tags into <BR/> tags. It is very painful and error prone. I suspect this problem occurs for copying text other than code as well.

But wait, there's a workaround!

Another ThreeWill associate (Bo George) showed me a trick where he simply copies his code from Visual Studio 2005 into another instance of Word and then copies it directly into the appropriate location in the Rich Text editor. Not a perfect solution since you are still having to use the standard Rich Text editor, but much better than the alternative! This even works for wikis!

Here's the same code using the approach just described:

 

Post a comment below if you have found a better solution!