As many faculty have learned, copying and pasting text into a Blackboard text box from Microsoft Word or a Web page introduces code that Blackboard can’t decipher leading to disastrous results.
This “bad” code (which you can’t see unless you toggle your Blackboard text box into HTML mode) can cause announcements or content items to become garbled and/or un-editable, and it can prevent students from navigating in a content area past a content item that contains such code. In addition, bad code introduced into test questions, blog entries or discussion board posts, can render it impossible to view or grade those items.
The solution, in the past, has been to first copy/paste text into WordPad, which expunges the bad code, and then copy/paste it into a Blackboard text box. However, did you know that in the new version of Blackboard, there is a tool on the text box toolbar that is designed to filter out the bad code that comes in with text that has been copied/pasted from Word or a Web page? This “Remove Formatting” tool appears as a button on the far right of the top toolbar in the Blackboard visual text box editor (VTBE) and has an icon in the form of an eraser.
Here’s how you use it: paste in text that you’ve copied from a Word document or Web page; highlight all of the pasted text in the text box and then select the “Remove Formatting” button. When you do this, the bad code is removed along with any formatting (font, size, color, style, etc.) that had been applied to the pasted text, and the text reverts to the default Blackboard text format.
The caveat is that, although this tool was designed to remove all of the bad code from pasted text, it doesn’t always remove all of the bad code, which can occasionally result in the types of issues described above. This problem is targeted for correction in a future version of Blackboard, at which time it will be possible to paste text into Blackboard text boxes with complete confidence. In the meantime, if you wish to avoid any possibility of introducing bad code into your Blackboard content, the advisable way to go is still to first copy/paste the text into WordPad and then copy/paste it from WordPad into your Blackboard text box.
Use the following links to view tutorials on how to copy and paste text into a Blackboard text box:
- PC Users: Copy and Paste from a Document into Blackboard
- Mac Users: Copy and Paste from a Document into Blackboard
As always, please feel free to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070 / DLHelp@hvcc.edu) if you have any questions about this.
Published: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 12:45:51 +0000 by m.petersen