Microsoft Word is still the best word processor out there, and because of this it’s got a wide range of interoperability with other programmes that deal with text.
The problem is that sometimes this interoperability doesn’t work universally, and some of the things that Word does to make your document seem prettier – like automatically formatting characters – ends up being a problem.
I use Notepad++ a lot for small bits of plain text or code, and Brackets for larger projects, and sometimes this code formatting causes problems when copying in content for some sort of programmatic use.
That’s why I’ve added the code for a Notepad++ macro below and found a great Brackets plugin that allows for search and replacing selected text.
If you use Notepad++, you’ll need to copy the contents of the Gist below into your shortcuts.xml file, which on Windows lives at C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++
For Brackets it’s much easier, in the Brackets plugin menu search for “specRep – Special Character Replacer” and install that to get started.
I hope this makes it easier for you to use text from Word in plain text or other projects when that time comes around.