Adobe FrameMaker: Pasting Text from Microsoft Word

This is one of my all-time favorite tips because it's something I have to deal with on a regular basis.

Let's say I need to replace a paragraph in my FrameMaker document with one from an MS Word file. The process seems easy enough: go to Word, select and copy the paragraph to the clipboard, return to FrameMaker, select the old text, and Paste. Right? Wrong!

Instead of the text simply replacing my highlighted FrameMaker text, the clipboard text is pasted as an OLE object (OLE stands for Object Linking and Embedding–it's a Microsoft technology that allows you to embed and link objects into documents). The pasted text appears within an anchored frame–not exactly what I was looking for.

To get around the anchored frame, I'll now have to undo the Paste step (by using the Undo command) and choose Paste Special, select "text" and then click OK.

When I need to paste text between Word and FrameMaker, I almost always want regular old text to appear, not an OLE object. While the extra work I mentioned above will give me the results I wanted, why doesn't the pasted text just appear as text by default? Why do I get the OLE object in the first place?

The answer is FrameMaker's "Clipboard Format Priority" list. By default, FrameMaker is set to paste objects from Word as OLE. If you want to change the paste priority order, you can do so by editing the maker.ini file (the maker.ini file is FrameMaker's initialization file.).

Note: Before attempting the following steps, please make a back-up copy of the maker.ini file in case you need to restore it later.

1. Open C:\Program Files\Adobe\FrameMakerX\maker.ini in a text editor like Notepad
2. Scroll down until you find:

   ClipboardFormatsPriorities=FILE, OLE 2, EMF, META, DIB, BMP, MIFW, MIF, RTF, UNICODE TEXT, TEXT

   This list is read from left to right by FrameMaker, and OLE has a higher priority than TEXT, so if an object can be pasted as either OLE or TEXT, it will paste as OLE.

3. Rearrange the order so that TEXT is first and OLE is last:

   ClipboardFormatsPriorities=TEXT, FILE, EMF, META, DIB, BMP, MIFW, MIF, RTF, UNICODE TEXT, OLE 2

4. Save and close the file and restart FrameMaker.
5. Go ahead and copy and paste text from Word.

   Look, Ma! No need for Paste Special! Wow!

Need some more help with FrameMaker? I've got an online Introduction to FrameMaker 9 class coming up October 22-23, 2009. Sign up today.