3 Tips to Boost Your Editing Skills in Drupal

Drupal’s powerful what-you-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) HTML text editor has features you are familiar with in applications like Microsoft Word to improve your web editing efficiency. CKEditor is the formal name of Drupal’s feature-packed text editor. Below we list a few tips to help boost your editing skills and speed up your workflow.

Tip 1: Pasting Content in Drupal

The Paste from Word  feature allows you to copy content directly from Microsoft Word or other source and paste it, maintaining the original structure and formatting. Drupal automatically detects the content and transforms it into a structured, clean HTML format.

Paste from Word  maintains most text formatting features with some exceptions related to advanced styling or customizations not supported by HTML, e.g. it will paste only standard bullets from the bullet library, or will not use a double strikethrough effect. Those elements are replaced by the system defaults to resemble your content in the most accurate way.

It’s easy to use the Paste from Word  feature. Simply highlight and copy your content from MS Word or any other source, which is copied to your computer’s clipboard. In Drupal, place your cursor in the editor window and click the Paste from Word icon from the WYSIWYG toolbar. Your content will be pasted directly from the clipboard into your editing screen.

In some web browsers, you may see a small pop-up window that requires you to hit “Ctrl V” to paste content into the box and select OK. From there, you will be able to edit using the WYSIWYG, as needed.

Here is sample content from a Microsoft Word document:

Here is what it looks like in Drupal:

Tip 2: Pasting Content from Microsoft Excel

The Paste from Word  button allows you to paste content from Microsoft Excel and maintain its original content structure and formatting. Some of the more advanced Excel features are not supported yet and will be added in the future.

The following formatting will be retained when pasting from Microsoft Excel:

• Text formatting
  • Text and background colors
  • Font name, style and size
  • Basic formatting (bold, italic, underline)
  • Font effects (strikethrough, superscript, subscript)
  • Heading levels
  • Text alignment
• Cell formatting (size, background, borders, special characters)
• Row and column size

It’s easy to paste Excel content using the Paste from Word  feature, simply highlight and copy your content from Excel, which is then copied to your computer’s clipboard. In Drupal, place your cursor in the editor window and click the Paste from Word  icon from the WYSIWYG toolbar. Your content will be pasted directly from the clipboard into your editing screen.

Here is sample content from a Microsoft Excel document:

Here is what it will look like after pasting with the Paste from Word plugin:

Tip 3: Common Keyboard shortcuts

It's hard to remember all the keyboard shortcuts out there. But luckily, most programs adopt conventions (like Ctrl+S, which always saves what you're working on). Below are some of the most common keyboard shortcuts out there that can be applied in Drupal while editing your text:

CKEditor is a market leader in transforming content to valid HTML and they constantly upgrade to include new features and functionality. As new releases are published we will continue to include them in our Drupal updates and fixes.

Note: Adapted from CKEditors online documentation