Q: When I paste content directly from WORD, it comes out all garbled and messed up.

A: “What you see” in Word is not always “what you get” in CommonSpot. This is because Word appends numerous “trash”  HTML tags to text that CommonSpot – and some browsers – do not interpret the same way Word does. When this happens, the browser makes a “best guess” at displaying the content, which almost always is NOT what you wanted.

To prevent this:

Say YES When you are asked if you want to clean it first of all the formatting tags that are specific for Microsoft Word.

You can think of the Paste from Word command as a combination the Paste command and the Clean Word Markup command. If the content you copied from Microsoft Word includes images, when you paste it in the Rich Text Editor area you’ll notice that images are replaced by a generic placeholder so that you will not lose track of them and their position. This way you can easily upload and then insert the needed images in the page.

You may lose some of the specific formatting, but you will get clean, editable formats for your web page.

Q: I cannot find a page on my site. I deleted the link to it, so I no longer can find it.

A: 

Locate One of Your Own Pages

1. Click the “Page & Template Management” icon, and select “My Pages”.
2. Expand your list of pages by clicking the plus [+] symbol next to the “My Pages” item (or the “My Templates” or “My Documents” items).
3. Click on a page title to locate the specified page.
4. The selected page appears in the main browser window.
5. Close or minimize the “My Pages” window in order to work on the selected page.
6. You can also use the “My Pages” window to select one or more pages to be moved to a different sub-subsite, or to be deleted.

Locate Any Page in Your Subsite

1. Click on the “Tools & Information” icon
2. Click on the “Subsite” entry and select your subsite
3. Select from the “Document Type” listing: CommonSpot Page, Document, etc.
4. Click “Next”
5. A list of pages in the subsite will be displayed

Walking the Template Hierarchy

When you are in “Read,” “Edit,” or “Author” mode, the Page and Template Managment menu includes the choice “Template Hierarchy…”, which brings up a large dialog window that

• lists the templates from which the current page (or template) derives;
• provides a section that can be expanded to list all pages derived from the current page’s parent template; and,
• if the current page is itself a template, provides a section that can be expanded to list all pages derived from the current page.

You can navigate to any listed template or page by clicking on the appropriate linked text. By taking this menu choice in a sequence of pages and templates, you can navigate to any page related to the one you started with.

Q: I need to edit or create a page on our CommonSpot site, but I cannot see any of the menus or icons. Help!

A: This could be one of several things. Here is a checklist:

• Are you in FireFox? CommonSpot only displays authoring mode correctly in FireFox.
• Are you on the author server? author.colby.edu
• Have you logged in? CommonSpot does not “know” who you are until you log in.
• Are you in AUTHOR Mode? No icons will appear on the page in READ mode.