Troubleshooting Unwanted Formatting Imported from Word

Author: Jakob Khazanovich

Date: June 12, 2025

Audience: Everyone

Environmental details: All Jama Connect instances

Summary

Jama Connect matches formatting for content imported or copy/pasted from Word documents to rich text fields, though there are occasions when Jama Connect cannot match formatting exactly. There are a few options to correct the formatting and ensure that going forward your content is viewed correctly both in Jama and after export.  

Solution

4 options:

1. Preprocess the document prior to import
   1. Clear text formatting in the source Word document before importing so you can add the desired formatting using Jama’s rich text editor.  You do not need to remove tables or images.

2. Clear formatting in Jama's rich text editor 

   1. Using Jama's rich text editor options, clear formatting

        

      and then use the buttons in the user interface to apply the desired formatting within Jama.  

3. Edit the source in the rich text field
   1. Press the source button in Jama's rich text editor and manually review and update the HTML tags.
4. Edit the source in a roundtrip export/import
   1. Exporting using the “Excel Export for Roundtrip” template will export the HTML tags for  rich text fields. You can then use “find and replace” in Excel to replace the necessary HTML tags rather than going item by item like in option 3. Then roundtrip import the items to incorporate the edited tags into Jama.

Cause

When ingesting content from Microsoft Word and other sources, Jama Connect translates the source rich text encoding to a more universal HTML encoding.  As with any conversion process, there will be occasional mis-matches in how that formatting is rendered within the UI.

For example, you may see bolded text in Word, which when imported into Jama appears to be bolded within the rich text field. When trying to toggle the bolding with the bold button in the user interface, nothing happens. After pressing the "Source" button , you notice that instead of having just a <strong> HTML tag to identify the text as bolded, there is a more complicated HTML tag that makes the font weighted to bold, like <strong style="font-weight:bold">. This more complicated tag is not affected when using the bold button in the user interface. 

Prevention

Prevention is best achieved by clearing the formatting in Word before importing and formatting in content in Jama using the rich text editor buttons.

References

• Request a Solution Offering or Training from the Success Catalog

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