Paste Special in Live Writer breaks links on Windows 10. Can we workaround it?

Question

We use Windows Live Writer as an interface to standalone WordPress sites behind a firewall. After upgrading to Windows 10, we see a problem using 'Paste Special: Keep Formatting' when copying a table from Microsoft Word or Excel into LW.

The HTML generated should be:

    <a href="mailto:username.usersurname@companysite.com">

but it looks like this:

    <a style="href: &quot;mailto:username.usersurname@companysite.com&quot;">

The end result is that the mailto: name is underlined as if it's a link but mailto: doesn't work (regardless of which browser). Windows Live Writer is no longer supported and Open Live Writer currently has the same mistaken behavior. I'm trying to find a workaround process because our many contributors maintain their tables in spreadsheets or docs and only copy them to LW to post.

Notes on my investigation so far:

• Similar problem identified in http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowslive/forum/livemail-email/windows-live-mail-2012-missing-links-while-copying/fb67856e-a4b5-42ec-9ada-e1b08561157f?auth=1. Acknowledged as a real bug, the recommendation at that time was to go to install IE10, which is not possible on Windows 10.
• Proper mail client is configured in Windows 10 - I found a number of references to that problem, but I don't think those had the badly formed html.
• Creating a fresh table in LW with mailto: links works. It's specifically 'Paste Special: Keep Formatting' that's broken.
• Currently on Windows 10, Windows Live Writer 2012.
• My only workaround so far is for Excel - save the table as Web Page, open the relevant file in a browser (for me,it's sheet001), ctl+U to see the code, copy the code into LW's source. But a parallel process in Word doesn't seem to work.
• Pasting directly into the WordPress back-end editor loses some of the pretty table formatting (as you might expect), but the mailto:'s work.

• After more testing, the badly formed links aren't restricted to mailto: - regular hyperlinks that have been copy and pasted with Paste Special: Keep Formatting have the same incorrect html syntax as above.

   <a style="href:&quot;http://sharepoint.something.com/sites/path/default.aspx&quot;"
  

I'm looking for a practical workaround that would work for a very large group of part-time contributors. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

We found an answer that will work for us - so I'll share it in case it helps anyone else.

Our corporate MS Word 365 can publish to our WordPress sites. Copying tables from Excel retains hyperlinks, colors, and tables can be edited. There's a fairly rich table creation interface inside the blogging interface. I'm sure there are limitations that we'll find - such as not being able to download the WP theme for true wysiwyg like Live Writer...but overall, we can work with this.

Here's how to publish from MS Word 365 to WordPress:

1. Go to MS Word 365
2. Open a new blank document
3. Go to File -> Share -> Post to Blog, and click the Post to Blog button
4. You'll see the Register blog account message -> click Register now
5. Choose WordPress from the dropdown of blog providers
6. Blog at http://< Enter your blog URL here >/xmlrpc.php [insert url of WP instance and keep the xmlrpc.php part]. Example: http://yourgroup.yourcompany.com/sandbox/ap/blog/xmlrpc.php
7. Enter admin & password, and choose remember password
8. Now you can write your post, give it a title, copy from excel, look for published posts under "Open Existing", insert tables, add categories, manage blog accounts, etc.

Hope this helps you!