Where ever copy and pasting is involved, you're opening yourself up to a world of pain. You'll see strange spacing issues, random tabs, and crap that won't work no matter what the heck you do. Word, Wattpad, and whatever other text editor you like to use don't always work hand in hand. So how do you go about fixing these issues? Here are a couple offers of advice to help fix some of the more common problems.

Some of this stuff might be worth doing even without the need to fix a format, just on principal.

So the editing is on the fritz and you just can't get things to work the way you want them to. The simplest way to fix this is to clear formatting. Ctrl+A or "select all" under home/editing will select all of the text for you. After that, under home/font, at least in Microsoft word 2013/2016... has a clear format option. It looks like an eraser. Just google it, most word editors should have one.

So that's part of what you have to do. Here's the second part.

1) Select all of the text.

2) Change all of the fonts to the font of choice and size of choice.

3) Right click while it's selected, and go to paragraph.

4) Back sure text is aligned to the left (this is in home/paragraph)

5) Line spacing should be single or 1.5. (Unless it calls for double spaced)

6) The Before and After spacing are the spacing between paragraphs. This is the biggest difference you probably see. 6 pts is usually the minimum (either before or after or both). Decide where you want your spacing to be, in 95% of cases, whether it's before or after won't matter, it'll look the same. 6 pts would look normal, but you can bring it up to 12 without things looking too weird.

Anyway, those six steps would fix a large amount of errors, such as when you see all of your paragraphs crumbled up as a block of text.

Of course, how you paste also matters to how it looks. Back in the day, you used to have only one form of pasting. Nowadays, you can paste in many different formats. Once copying some text, right click to paste, and you'll see more than one option. You can go to advanced and see all the different ways to paste. Keep text only, paste with source formatting, merge formatting... Text out which paste option gives you the results you desire. You may find that you don't need to clear any formatting if you pasted it correctly in the first place.

Do not underestimate the use of the Replace function. It is seriously important when doing editing, and I think too many people do far more work than they need to because they never thing to use it. Here are a few simple mistakes that could quickly be fixed with the repair.

1) Replace ". " with ". " Yes, those are different. Two spaces after a period with one. (Or one with two if that happens to be your writing style. If your work has no decimals, you could also replace "." With ". " and then replaced ". " with ". ". Do you see what I just did there? I removed all of the instances in which you forgot to put a space after your period. The second replace fixes the double spaces you create from doing the first fix.

2) Replace "^p^p" with "^p". If someone is experiencing the format issues in which their paragraphs aren't being separated, they can fix it by the suggestion given in six above. However, many people don't do that. They just hit "enter" twice, effectively making two soft returns. This looks fine... Until you try to paste it into word or open it up in a word document that doesn't have this error. Then you look bad. This quickly fixes the "soft returns" and puts them back to how they're supposed to be.

3) Don't use tabs in your work? Try to replace "^t" with "" or " ". That's replacing it with nothing. In this case, you're getting rid of the tabs. If you ended up pasting in some awkwardly looking tabs, this is the quickest way to fix it. Just make sure the place the tabs are causing trouble is a place that doesn't need a space. (For example, between the number in a list and the first letter, there is sometimes a tab. Replacing it with nothing would get you "1.hdgd", where replacing it with space would give you the better looking "1. hdgd".

I'm not sure if we'd call this "formatting" per say, but nothing is more frustrating than seeing the bloody squiggly line under every other word, especially when you know the word to be right. There is an option to fixing it. That option is adding words to your word editors dictionary. In the spell check, there is an option to add to the dictionary, and when you right click on a squiggly lined word, add to the dictionary is another option.

However, that is only one aspect to fixing the problem. The other is to add dictionaries to your word editor. You may have a compiled list of words you've added over the years, but I can assure you if your list has a theme, other people have compiled that list too.

Do you write anything involving science?

http://www.jpetrie.net/scientific-word-list-for-spell-checkersspelling-dictionaries/

There is a dictionary involving over 600,000 science words that don't typically show up in your word editor.

If you look hard enough, you can probably find them for other fields too, physics, psychology... or even Japanese names or German terms. Best yet, you can make one of your own. While you're writing up that novel outline, take every name, skill, city, country, or any other "made-up" stuff and compile it into a dictionary, then add it to Word.

These lists are written up in notepad, and you can upload them by clicking the file, options, proofing, and custom dictionaries. (Or preferences, author, and proofing tools, depending on your word version).

Simple advice, but when all else fails, use notepad. Paste everything in notepad, save, quit, and reopen the file. Notepad doesn't save any of the formattings from other files. If someone accidently used too many paragraphs, it becomes much easier to see. Paragraphs all appear as a continuous line, so if you're seeing an empty line, you can see a place where you had to paragraph breaks.

This also can help you see breaks in your paragraph. If any line doesn't start with a capital letter, chances are, you have a break in the middle of a paragraph.

Finally, it helps you check paragraph length. Since every paragraph is lined up, you can quickly see which paragraphs are really long, and see if you're varying paragraph length well or not.

However, the main advantage of pasting into notepad is that you lose all the formatting. This can be bad if you use a lot of italics and bold, but good if you experience tons of formatting issues. Pasting from notepad to Wattpad is probably one of the safest ways to ensure that your document pastes correctly.

Pdf is a format you probably heard about. It usually comes with a free viewer (Foxit or adobe reader) and costs a $100 if you wanted to edit a pdf directly. PDF is the format you see when you scan a document. The reason this file type is so great is because it's very stable. If you open a document in one word editor and then open it in another, there is no guarantee the word files will look alike. The example I already mentioned is the spacing before and after paragraphs. If your word has it set up so there is no spacing, and you open a file that expects spacing, it'll look like a block of text, rather than the nicely spaced thing you're supposed to see.

A pdf will never have this problem. Anything you open in a pdf will look the same on every PC and pdf viewer. This becomes really important when you're talking about files with numerous photos and formatting. Posters, presentations, and newspapers all benefit from being in pdf. Pictures won't shift, images won't move, the text won't change. If you want them to look the same no matter what device you're on, pdf is the way to go.

Keep this in mind, students, if you're working on a big assignment for school, pdf will ensure the assignment gets to school looking like it's supposed to.

That said... pdf is a horrible format if someone is looking to paste from the file. Each line of text is treated as its own paragraph in a pdf viewer, and thus when you copy and paste a pdf, you end up with broken lines. You can fix them in notepad, but it's still a not insignificant amount of work. Long story short... pdf files are great for viewing but don't use them as an editing file. If you want to preserve your format permanently, pdf is great, if you want to continue to make edits, paste, and copy... leave pdf alone.

As the final form of your book, pdf works like no other, but for the sake of pasting it into Wattpad, I would recommend you avoid it.

I hope that'll help a little with your future writing adventures. Good Luck, and Happy Writing!