Please Note:
This article is part of an ongoing series where I sum up my years of blogging experience into several in-depth articles. You can read them here.
Ever since WordPress has switched to the Gutenberg editor as its default editor of choice, many bloggers are having a hard time writing their blog posts in it. It slows down the entire writing process when all you want is to write. Although the Gutenberg editor is excellent for structuring the layout of the content, but when it comes to writing blog articles for long hours, it struggles.
A dedicated word processor such as google doc or Microsoft word is far more efficient for the writing task. Because, it has many features such as a built-in spelling checker, easy styling and formatting which drastically help bloggers to cut down the writing time.
Another reason for not using the Gutenberg editor could be when you don’t want your writers or authors to have direct access to the back-end of your WordPress site. Also, the post-writing process of copying & pasting text from Microsoft word to Gutenberg editor takes an unnecessary amount of time and energy.
Whatever reason you might have, there is one WordPress plugin that makes the process of importing .docx files into the Gutenberg editor much easier, even without losing any formatting such as headers, lists, and hyperlinks, etc.
The name of the plugin is “Mammoth .docx converter” and it’s 100% free. As of now it supports the following features which is not a lot, but give us a head start.
- Heading such as H1, H2 H3 etc.
- Lists & hyperlinks.
- Tables, but without any border and background color.
- Footnotes and end notes.
- Image, but file name changes on upload.
- Bold, italics, superscript and subscript.
- Text boxes get converted as simple paragraph blocks.
Believe it or not, manual copy-pasting text from the word document to Gutenberg is not as easy as it seems. During the process, a lot of formatting gets removed which requires additional fixes.
Sadly, there is no other plugin I have come across that does this better than the Mammoth .docs converter. Although the Mammoth .docx converter is not perfect by any means. But it could reduce your work by almost 80%. In this tutorial, I’ll show you the entire process of how I do it.
Step 1: Install the plugin & activate it
The first thing you need to do is install the plugin and activate it. You can install the plugin directly from your WordPress admin area.
Install & Activate The Mammoth .docx converterStep 2: Upload the .docx file
After activating the plugin, you will see an upload button at the bottom of every edit page. Simply create a new post or page and scroll down at the bottom.
Browse the .docx file and uploadThere you need to browse and select the desire .docx file that you want to upload. The process can take a few moments.
Step 3: Insert into editor
After the process gets completed you’ll see three options; visual, raw HTML, message. If it seems OK, just click on the “Insert into editor” button.
You can edit the entry after click on “insert into editor”There you go, you have successfully imported the .docx file into WordPress Gutenberg editor.
