Copy and Pasting from a Word document in Protected Mode

Overview

When using the Windows operating system, copying and pasting content from Word 2013 (or later) in “Protected View” will result in plain, unformatted text. This is due to how Protected View interacts with the clipboard. In this article we will learn what Protected View means in the context of a Word document and why pasting content from this view results in plain, unformatted text.

Protected View and Word

In Microsoft Word, Protected View is a read-only mode where most of the editing functions are disabled.

When files are downloaded from the internet they may contain viruses, malware, etc that can harm your computer.To protect your computer from these issues, Word documents are opened in Protected View. You can refer to this article for more details on Protected View. When you open a Word document in protected view Word will provide you a notification of this fact at the top of the document:

Protected View and Word Copy/Paste

First lets understand how word copy and paste works in TinyMCE and Textbox.io.

When content is copied from MS Word, Word places several data formats of that content onto the clipboard including HTML, RTF, Plain Text, and Images. Because TinyMCE and Textbox.io  are HTML editors they will use the HTML data format from the clipboard.

When you copy content from a Word document in Protected mode, you will see that the content will be pasted as plain, unformatted text. The reason this happens is because Word does not create an HTML representation of the document in the clipboard when you perform a copy in Protected Mode. When TinyMCE or Textbox.io don’t find HTML in the clipboard our editors will fall back to using the Plain Text content in the clipboard - this leads to you getting the plain unformatted text representation of the content.

How Do I Fix This Issue?

If Word opens your document in Protected View ,click on the ‘Enable Editing’  button seen on the notification bar 

Clicking on the ‘Enable Editing’ button disables the read-only Protected View mode and allows you to the document. You can now copy and paste content from the Word document into the editor and all the formatting will be retained.

Conclusion

By clicking on ‘Enable Editing’ button you can exit the protected view mode and successfully copy and paste content from Word document in the editor and maintain the content format.