You have created texts in Microsoft Office for your online shop and inserted them in the right places in your back office? When you check the storefront, however, you notice that the same content is not visible to visitors? Don’t worry! This is not a system error. Read the ePages blog to learn the cause of this apparent bug—and learn how to prevent it from occurring.

It is one of the most common customer queries posed to the ePages Support Center: content inserted in the back office is not displayed in the storefront. Oddly enough, this issue happens only with Internet Explorer; all other browsers work flawlessly. What happened?

This “error” is a result of the interplay between Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer. More specifically, the problem occurs as follows. If you use MS Word to create and format texts, then this popular word-processing programme uses its own type of invisible formatting commands—to underline or boldface, for example. Although these commands are similar to HTML formatting commands (e.g. as they are used to display website content), the MS Word formatting commands are not compatible with Internet Explorer. If you copy the texts created and formatted in Word and use the editor to insert them into your shop, then all the formatting commands will be transferred and added in the editor—likewise invisibly. This then causes display errors in—of all browsers—Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

The solution to this problem

If the aforementioned display errors occur in Internet Explorer, please locate the corresponding page in your back office. Select the Data Sheet mode so that you can see the texts’ formatting commands. You can access Data Sheet mode via the General/Description tab. Delete the formatting commands which had been copied out of Microsoft Word. Then switch to the editor and graphically modify the texts in accordance with your preferences.

The ideal solution for creating content is to not copy text in MS Word and paste it directly into your editor. In other words, it is best to create and format content directly in your shop’s editor.

If you need to write a lot of text and thus prefer to use Microsoft Word, do not forget to delete all formatting commands prior to inserting content into your shop. A good way of doing this is to use the editor supplied with your operating system: Notepad (Microsoft Windows) or Textedit (Apple OS). Copy your content in MS Word and paste it into one of these two programmes. After insertion, highlight and copy the content anew—now devoid of unnecessary formatting—and paste it into your shop’s editor. You can now adapt the content to suit your graphics-related preferences.
 

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