Contributors–how to help foolproof your copy-paste work

Contributors.

Ah how we love their help, and dread their missed deadlines.

Managing your contributors is a personal challenge–part science, part art, mostly enthusiasm and effort.  Mangaging their text, on the other hand, is a fairly straightforward process, even though you may recieve multiple formats and styles.

Many contributors will provide you with articles created in MS Word, or jotted down in emails of various types–webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), or standard email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.).

While the contributors material is welcome, their formatting is not.  If you have chosen specific fonts, styles and formats, its particularly frustrating to waste time and effort re-formatting through the previous programs efforts.  Re-typing long stretches of text while still meeting deadlines is often impossible, but it can take as much time to fix formatting that the previous document placed on the text.  There has to be a simpler way around the issue.

The solution?  You have a few choices–the first and most important:

Establish firm contributor guidelines.

Contributors to your bulletin, newsletter, flyer, or report would like to help create the best document possible–if you establish which fonts, point sizes, and styles you will use and inform them, they’ll do their best to provide what you need.

If you let them know you would prefer the graphics they wish to use to be sent separately (attached to their email, or sent via flash drive or CD), this will allow you to use graphics to get “best results“.

And of course, you’ll want to set a deadline for contributions, and stick to it.

Setting up guidelines will help, but there are exceptions for every rule:

For text formatting headaches you have to deal with, I recommend the humble MS Notepad.

“Notepad is a washing machine for text.”

—Tracie Peters

Included under “Start–>programs–>Accessories”, Notepad is a VERY simple program. Its unable to “remember” formatting, which is why we love it.  If a copy/pasted block of text has formatting or style errors, paste it into Notepad.  Then, copy the block of text from Notepad and paste it into your document.  Voilà—plain vanilla text…no more formatting.