[thelist] Removing Microsoft Word special characters

[Roger Ly]

>Is there a way to strip "smart" quotes, em dashes and ellipses from
Word
>copy? (i.e. all "special" Word characters)

Graham,

In our case, we just turn off smart quotes in Word.  Of course that does
limit your ability to use them in other situations, but all our
spec/content writers now have Word default with smart quotes off.

When you copy and paste into your doc, it now copies regular quotes and
apostrophes.

Word2K2: 
Tools -> AutoCorrect options -> AutoCorrect As You Type -> uncheck
"Straight quotes" with "Smart quotes"

Tools -> AutoCorrect options -> AutoFormat -> uncheck "Straight quotes"
with "smart quotes"

To turn off em dashes, uncheck the "hyphens with dashes" option in the
above location.

I'm not sure about ellipses.

After doing this, you can remove all instances of smart quotes in the
doc by doing a search and replace, searching for " and replacing with "
(and the same with the ' ).  Ditto for all other things you want to
replace.  Just make sure you turn off the replace options before you do
the search and replace, otherwise you'll just be adding back in smart
quotes to the document.

Roger