Enable Web Safe Characters in Microsoft Word 2010
Anyone who writes content for the internet and doesn’t have the luxury of adding it via a WYSIWYG editor that converts un-web-safe characters will appreciate this post. Microsoft Word is a great text editor packed with useful tools, but one of the biggest pains is that by default it uses what it calls “smart quotes” (that show up on web pages like diamonds with question marks in the middle) instead of the web-friendly "straight quotes".
This will guide you through turning off Microsoft Word smart quotes in 3 simple steps, which will render straight quotes in their place moving forward.
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In the top left corner of the document, click “File” and then “options”.
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Click “Proofing” and then click “AutoCorrect Options…”
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Under “Replace as you type”, un-check the box labeled "Straight quotes" with “smart quotes”.
A quick side note to my fellow web developers out there - I did find a use for having smart quotes enabled. In one of my side projects I built a CMS tailored specifically to the needs of the site, and I add the content in directly through SQL INSERTs (#YOLO). The reason I think the smart quotes helps is that before I add the content to the database, targeting the non-web-friendly characters with a mass replace also helps escape the content for the SQL INSERT.
For example, I do a mass replace of the following MS Word chars “ ” ‘ ’ – … and mass-replace them with \" \" \' \' - ...
Far from a best practice, but it works and I'm not too worried about the usability of the site from an admin perspective, as I'll likely always be the sole author.