Pasting content from Microsoft Office

Paste from Office features let you paste content from Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel and preserve its original structure and formatting. This is the basic, open-source Paste from Office feature. You can also try the more advanced, premium paste from Office enhanced feature.

# Demo

Use these sample documents to test pasting from Microsoft Office Word and Excel:

• Sample Word document
• Sample Excel spreadsheet

To test pasting from Office, download the sample documents and open them in Microsoft Office applications. Then, copy the content and paste it into the editor below.

# Paste from Office enhanced

Refer to the paste from Office enhanced guide for a full comparison of supported styles and formatting between the basic and premium versions.

# Additional feature information

Thanks to the paste from Office feature, you can copy and paste Microsoft Word documents into CKEditor 5 and maintain basic text styling, heading levels, links, lists, tables, and images.

When the plugin is enabled, it automatically detects Microsoft Word content and transforms its structure and formatting to clean HTML which is then transformed into semantic content by the editor.

The PasteFromOffice plugin also allows you to paste content from Google Docs. See the pasting content from Google Docs guide to learn more.

# Support for other office applications

At the current stage, the focus of @ckeditor/ckeditor5-paste-from-office and @ckeditor/ckeditor5-paste-from-office-enhanced packages is on supporting content that comes from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Google Docs. However, it does not mean that pasting from other similar applications (such as Microsoft PowerPoint) is not supported.

By default, CKEditor 5 will support pasting rich-text content from these applications, however, some styles and formatting may be lost, depending on the source application. Also, other minor bugs may appear.

You can find more information regarding compatibility with other applications in this ticket.

If you think that support for any of the applications needs improvements, please add 👍  and comments in the following issues:

• Support pasting from Libre Office.
• Support pasting from Pages.

Feel free to open a new feature request for other similar applications, too!

# Automatic content filtering

With CKEditor 5 you do not need to worry about pasting messy content from Microsoft Word (or any other possible sources). Thanks to the CKEditor 5 custom data model, only content that is specifically handled by the loaded rich-text editor features will be preserved.

This means that if you did not enable, for instance, font family and font size features, this sort of formatting will be automatically stripped off when you paste content from Microsoft Word and other sources (like other websites).

# Installation

To add this feature to your rich-text editor, install the @ckeditor/ckeditor5-paste-from-office package:

npm install --save @ckeditor/ckeditor5-paste-from-office

Then add the PasteFromOffice plugin to your plugin list:

import { PasteFromOffice } from '@ckeditor/ckeditor5-paste-from-office';

ClassicEditor
    .create( document.querySelector( '#editor' ), {
        plugins: [ PasteFromOffice, Bold, /* ... */ ]
    } )
    .then( /* ... */ )
    .catch( /* ... */ );

# Known issues

If the pasted document contains both images and styled text (like headings), images are sometimes not pasted properly. Unfortunately, for some operating systems, browsers, and Word versions the image data is not available in the clipboard in this case.

It is advised to try and paste the image separately from the body of the text if this error occurs.

If the image is represented in the Word content by the VML syntax (like this one: <v:shape><v:imagedata src="...."/></v:shape>), it will not be pasted either as this notation is not supported by CKEditor 5. If you’d like to see this feature implemented, add a 👍  reaction to this GitHub issue.

# Related features

CKEditor 5 supports a wider range of paste features, including:

• Paste from Office enhanced – Paste from Office enhanced is a premium version of the plugin that offers far greater capabilities.
• Paste from Google Docs – Paste content from Google Docs, maintaining the original formatting and structure.
• Paste plain text – Paste text without formatting that will inherit the style of the content it was pasted into.
• Import from Word – Convert Word files directly into HTML content. You can read more about the differences between the paste from Office and import from Word features in the dedicated comparison guide.
• Paste Markdown – Paste Markdown-formatted content straight into the editor.

# Contribute

The source code of the feature is available on GitHub at https://github.com/ckeditor/ckeditor5/tree/master/packages/ckeditor5-paste-from-office.