Stupid word, I'll stop using you in April assuming I graduate.

March 4, 2010 1:59 PM

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm having trouble with the paste function on my computer.

Ever since I had to reinstall word (power point just stopped working, trying to finish my thesis and my computer keeps coming up with some new weird curveball to throw me), each time I copy something from a word document and try to paste it anywhere outside of word it preceeds the pasted text with this: Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000186 EndHTML:0000002718 StartFragment:0000002364 EndFragment:0000002682 SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/myname/myname%20Files/document.doc

It's Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac (OS 10.4.11 if it matters).

It's driving me batty, and I can't seem to find the appropriate way to Google the darn thing to make it go away. Help me please, I have enough things trying to drive me insane right now!

posted by katers890 to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

That's the Windows CF_HTML Clipboard Format. No idea why you're seeing that on Mac OS X. Maybe there's a setting about exporting to clipboard in HTML or something similar, somewhere?
posted by effbot at 2:06 PM on March 4, 2010

Um, I can't solve your problem the way you want it to be solved, but if you can install new software on your computer I really like OpenOffice for its open compatibilities and general niceness and logicalness. You just install it, then open your thesis using OpenOffice instead of Word, and you can even still save it as a .doc file.
posted by Night_owl at 2:06 PM on March 4, 2010

What are you trying to paste into? Use the "paste special" function if they have that.
posted by Melismata at 2:26 PM on March 4, 2010

Response by poster: It's when I paste into anything outside of Word.

Sure I could go to OpenOffice or use paste special all the time, or keep just deleting manually (which is what I am currently doing), but I'd rather just fix the actual problem. And in 1 month I'll probably just be getting a new computer, but I need this one to stay functioning with as few problems/annoyances as I can until then.
posted by katers890 at 2:30 PM on March 4, 2010

Never seen that before. Do you have any 3rd party extensions installed that might interfere with normal clipboard functionality?
posted by chairface at 2:50 PM on March 4, 2010

Perhaps a corrupted preference file? Try the procedure listed under the section Move the Office preferences files to the desktop in this support page.
posted by jaimev at 3:03 PM on March 4, 2010

Response by poster: Well at least my problems are excitingly unique.

No 3rd party extensions, and moving/remaking the preference files had no effect. I will say my computer is being buggy. I got it wrong in my original post, I reinstalled Office because it was giving me weird Visual Basic load errors every time I opened any Office product. Adobe Illustrator was the one that just stopped working and I couldn't reinstall it (or install the newer version) until I created a new users on my computer and installed it under that user.
posted by katers890 at 3:20 PM on March 4, 2010

It's happened to me in the past before, too, but it doesn't do it all the time. Sorry I'm no help, but you're not the only one to have had this problem!
posted by Solon and Thanks at 4:05 PM on March 4, 2010

Try opening Font Book, disabling all of the fonts, and see if the paste works correctly. If it helps, you have to do trial and error to figure out which one is the problem. A bad font has caused a few very odd problems for me before.
posted by bessel functions seem unnecessarily complicated at 5:00 PM on March 4, 2010

Try something like Plain Clip or Clyppan...good luck.
posted by xiaolongbao at 5:36 PM on March 4, 2010

If you don't mind picking up another program once you get this fixed, I recommend Mellel for non techy users. My girlfriend was working on a few papers and her thesis and Word kept crashing and corrupting those documents, not to mention had a host of formatting glitches she had to constantly go back and re-fix. I rescued her thesis and had her use Mellel and she loved it, very stable.

(For techy users, I recommend TeX or some variant thereof.)
posted by Brian Puccio at 3:14 AM on March 5, 2010

To take this in a completely other direction - and I say this because you mention your computer is "being buggy", presumably in situations outside Word alone - try running some utilities on the computer. Disk Warrior and Drive Genius are great, if you know someone who has the CD you can boot from. Onyx is free, also very useful, and can be downloaded here.
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:38 AM on March 5, 2010