How do I get rid of those weird characters that show up when pasting text from Word into Blackboard?

You may copy and paste text from Microsoft Word into Notepad(PC) or Text Editor(MAC). This will rid the text of any extracted code or special characters before pasting into Blackboard. All formatting will be lost in this process.

In Word, the default setting for quotation marks and apostrophes is something called "Smart Quotes." This setting replaces "regular" quotes with the curly quotes. When you paste text into Bb, the text editor converts it automatically to HTML to be viewed on the Web.

Since Blackboard's text editor doesn't know what to do with "smart quotes, it replaces each "character" with a question mark. There is also a setting that converts two hyphens (--) into a long dash. If you do a lot of copy/pasting from Word you can turn off the "smart quotes" feature:

1. In Word, go to the TOOLS menu --> AUTOCORRECT.
2. Click the Format as you Type tab.
3. The first box is "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes." Uncheck the box.
4. OPTIONAL: Uncheck the hyphen/dash box.

For existing text, you'll have to use FIND and REPLACE (from the Edit Menu) to change the "smart quotes" to "straight quotes" for the changes to take effect.