Copying Multilingual Text in Different Formats in Office

You can use the Clipboard to copy multilingual text from one Microsoft Office 2003 Editions application to another. Text from the Clipboard that is formatted as RTF, HTML, or Unicode can successfully be pasted into Office applications.

Multilingual text formatted as RTF, HTML, or Unicode

When you copy text from a Microsoft Office 2003 Editions document, the RTF or HTML formatting data, as well as the Unicode text data, is stored on the Clipboard. This allows applications that do not support Unicode but do support data in multiple code pages to accept RTF text from the Clipboard, which retains some of the multilingual content. For example, both Microsoft Word 95 and Microsoft Word 6.0 accept multilingual text from the Clipboard as RTF format from later versions of Word.

All language versions of Word 95 and Word 6.0 can display text in most European languages. However, Asian and right-to-left language versions cannot display other Asian or right-to-left languages. Also, English and European versions of Word 6.0 and Word 95 cannot display any Asian or right-to-left text properly.

Word 97 can accept RTF and Unicode text from the Clipboard and display content in all European and most Asian languages. Word 2000 (and later) accepts HTML as well and properly handles all Asian and right-to-left content.

Microsoft Access 2000 (and later) and Microsoft Excel 2000 (and later) all support copying multilingual Unicode, RTF, or HTML text to the Clipboard. However, Access and Excel cannot accept RTF content. They can accept HTML-formatted text or Unicode text from the Clipboard instead.

Multilingual code page–based single-byte text

In some rare conditions, users may paste single-byte (ANSI) text into an Office 2003 Editions item (such as a Word document or an Excel worksheet) that is encoded in a code page that is different from the one their operating system uses. If this occurs, they may get unintelligible characters in that item, depending on the application into which they are pasting. This problem occurs because Office cannot determine which code page to use to interpret the single-byte text.

For example, you might paste text from a non-Unicode text editor that uses fonts to indicate which code page to use. If the text editor supplies only RTF and single-byte text, the font (and code page) information is lost when the text is pasted in an application that does not accept RTF (for example, Excel). Instead, the application uses the operating system’s code page, which maps some characters’ code points to unexpected or nonexistent characters.