Saving Word Documents as HTML for use in Blackboard
Strange characters particularly questions marks throughout your document occur when you use MSWord to generate your HTML. When you choose Save as Web Page from your Word document, the result is an HTML document that uses XML. Blackboard cannot handle the XML and fills your document with strange symbols like question marks. Formatting will also vary when documents are saved this way.
To fix the problem we have four possible solutions.
- Resave the document as filtered HTML.
- Go to the File Menu and choose Save As.
- Choose Web Page, Filtered.
- This generates HTML without the XML. This should elimintate most of the problems.
- If this does not help, you can remove the strange characters and reformat the document using either the HTML editor in Blackboard or you can use another HTML editor tool such as Dreamweaver. Alternately, you can copy the content from word and paste into Notepad (PC) or Text Edit (Mac) and then copy it again from there and paste into Blackboard. The pasting into Notepad or Text Edit strips the MS formating and creates plain text which you can edit in the Blackboard Text Editor.
- The third option is to create a PDF instead of HTML. This will preserve all the formatting too. You can do that in Word by going to Save As PDF.
