Paste Special

Scenario 1: You have a brand-new template, and you start copying your old web site content over to the new design. But then you realize that the fonts don't match -- the fonts from your old site don't match the fonts in the new site. Why not?

Scenario 2: You have a Word document with content that you want to place into your web site. So you start copying and pasting. You notice that the fonts from the Word doc are carrying over into your web site. Not only that, but when you view the HTML code, you see that there is a lot of excess, bloated code. Short of retyping all your content, how can you avoid this?

The answer to both problems: Use Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text.

When you paste content into FrontPage, FrontPage assumes that you want the text to be formatted fairly the same way that it was in the other application or web site. So, FrontPage will add lots of additional code to try to achieve the same formatting. This results in bloated code (i.e., longer download times) and inconsistent fonts between the original template design and your pasted text. Choosing Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text strips out all the excess formatting and puts JUST the text into your web page.

The one drawback to this method is that things like lists, bold, and italics will be lost. From personal experience, though, it's much easier to add those things back in than it is to try to strip out the excess formatting code.

So... use Paste Special, for cleaner, leaner pages.