Assistance with Formatting Knowledge Articles

[jrusso]

We often see articles imported from Word, or copy/paste from Word (even when "keep formatting":) that do not maintain a clean format in the article.  The is consistent issues with numbered lists and bullet point lists aligning text.  If there are multiple levels of formatting they don't appear clean to the reader.

Does anyone have suggestions, tips or instructions on how to maintain the formatting from Word docs?

[Lauren Methena]

Here's a thread that might be helpful that includes different tips, from using the clear formatting tool in ServiceNow to stripping content in Notepad and copy/pasting it into ServiceNow to using Word with absolutely no formatting.

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=abb8f2f0db99c510e2adc2230596...

If I find anything else, I'll post those resources, too.

Let me know if this helps and what follow up questions you have. 🙂

[Lauren Methena]

to answer your question specifically, the only thing I've found that keeps MOST of your formatting is to have folks use a stripped down Word template - with barebones formatting - no "styles," no "headlines," etc. It will keep bullets and bold, etc., but you might have to add in additional stuff. Attaching the template here for convenience, but it's also in the previous thread I posted.

Good luck! Please reply with questions - or mark helpful or correct if this helps.

[Keryn]

Although we do use the "remove formatting" feature, I have found that taking a basic HTML course has really benefited us.  We can quickly use the HTML editor to fix not only bulleted lists and the text position, but so many other format issues that the tool bar doesn't help with. 

I recommend learning how to use these tags/elements to begin with:

• <p>...</p>(paragraph) </p> 
• <ol>...</ol> (ordered list i.e. numbered list)
• <ul>...</ul> (unordered list i.e. bulleted list)
• <li>...</li> (list item i.e. the text that will be listed)
• <table>...</table>  (where you can add style elements for your table such as cell padding="5" so that you don't need to add padding: 5pt;" in all of the <td [table cells] lines
• <td (table date i.e. table cell styling goes here)
• style="...." (where you can add font size, padding, background color, vertical alignment etc. to a whole article, paragraph, list item, table row, or table cell)

[Rholmes007]

Thanks @Keryn @Lauren Methena  and @jrusso for this thread.  I'll reply with further questions if I run into issues. I'm exporting from Confluence with XML, HTML or pdf. Trying to import in batch. Not sure how this will work out, but I've got some help in this community, I see. 🙂