HELP !!!!!! WITH MY WINDOWS PROGRAM PLEASE

Another suggestion:
Select all and paste your text into notepad.
Open a new Word document.
Select all from notepad and paste it in the new document.

Because notepad just handles text - not formatting information.

Goodgulf

My suggestion is not to use Word at all if you're writing something intended for the LSF. Just use a plain text editor, either the very basic Notepad that is bundled with Windows or one of the more functional free ones such as Notepad++ or TxtEdit.

I now write all my spanking stories in Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/download/) another free open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, and then copy and paste into EditPad Lite or Notepad++ before sending them to the Library. I prefer to work in a true word-processor for tools like spell-check and word count, and I regard these as the base versions should I wish to post them elsewhere. But for the LSF, plain text is clearly the way to go.

I and I am sure many others sincerely hope your story made it in the Challenge.

CS

Spell check is wonderful. So is the primitive grammar checks offered by word processors. The formatting options they offer - I find they are a distraction when posting stories.

So I copy and paste everything to Notepad to clear the fonts, formatting, etc before posting anything to here, spanko.net, or my blog. It's the easiest way to strip out all the extra data that the library doesn't need.

Also, it means that I'm not sending details about myself. With most word processors when you go to properties you can learn something about the person who created the document but notepad doesn't store metadata.

Goodgulf

I find that when I try the cut-and-paste-from-word-processor-to-text-editor route there fact that line wraps/carriage returns are treated differently in these two formats makes each paragraph appear only on one line, thus rendering the text document unreadable.

It feels wrong to be submitting something here which I can't give a final check to, so I've been saving in the WP as 'Rich Text Format' which line-wraps in the same way that the WP does.

In my experience, most text editors have a 'word-wrap" mode in which lines will be displayed wrapped before the display margin. Note that exact placement of line ends will depend on window size, screen resolution, etc, but this will avoid the 1-line-to-a-paragraph issue.

RTF can be very useful and I believe that the LSF does accept that format, but it will still carry some font and formatting info that will not appear in a posted work here, and it is larger than a corresponding plain text format for a given set of content.

If you open notepad and click on "format" you'll see that the first option is called "word wrap". If you set that to checked then you get a normal looking display.

Goodgulf

I want to thank everyone for their excellent advice. I DID get my contest entry finished and entered, though I must apologize because in my rush to post on time I didn't do as thorough a job of proofreading as usual. I still haven't figured out how to reduce the 3 inch margins on the top and bottom of the page, but did post without problems. The most agreed upon advice given though was to copy and paste to a Notebook? I have no idea what that is, though I do understand copy and paste. Thank you all again, am working on figuring it all out.

flowerchild, I'm glad you were able to get your story entered.

The name of the program is "Notepad." It is Microsoft's simple text editor that comes with every Windows computer. It's like a Word Processor stripped down to its most basic essentials, with no fancy formatting options. (If you keep it simple, there is less that can go wrong.) Text files edited with Notepad will normally have a suffix of '.txt' whereas Word documents will normally have a suffix of '.doc' or '.docx'.



The picture shows the icons and commands for opening Word and Notepad. They may be in a different location on your computer. I always draft my stories in Word, so I have the benefit of the spellchecker, thesaurus, and usage helper. When I get it finished, I copy and paste it to a text file. I like to proof it again in text format using Notepad. It looks a little different, and sometimes I catch an error I didn't see in Word. When I'm ready to submit it, I send the text file only. As you can see in the Windows Explorer window on the right in the picture, I normally keep both a Word (.doc) and a text (.txt) version of my stories.