Content Saving Tips

Are you having problems adding or saving content in the Zillow Real Estate Guide? Read on for some tips and tricks.

Word and the Real Estate Guide

Microsoft Word and the Real Estate Guide have a love/hate relationship: Sometimes they like each other, sometimes they don't. If you have copied content from Microsoft Word and pasted it directly into a wiki page, you may have problems saving your content. (If there are problems, you will see an error message that says "We're detecting invalid HTML content. Please edit it.") This is likely because your content includes special characters (such as accents and "curly" quotes) that the Real Estate Guide doesn't recognize.

Firefox and the Real Estate Guide

Firefox seems to be more reliable when editing or writing to the Real Estate Guide. You can download a free version here.

Scrubbing Special Characters

If you'd like to copy content that you've already written (in Word, for instance) to the Real Estate Guide, try using Notepad.

• First, copy the content.
• Open Notepad, and paste your content into Notepad.
• Then copy all of your content in Notepad, and paste it into the page in the Real Estate Guide.
• At this point, you should be able to save your content.

Still not working? Try this virtually failproof way to scrub your content of all special characters:

• First, open the Word document containing your content (or copy your content to a Word document if it's not already in one).
• In the Word document, click "File." In the dropdown list, click "Save As."
• A box will open up. In the "Save as type" field, click the arrow, which will release a dropdown list. Select "Plain Text."
• Click "Save."
• A File Conversion box will pop up. Under "Text encoding," select the radio button for "MS-DOS."
• Select the checkbox next to "Allow character substitution.
• Click "OK."
• Now open the new text file you have created. It should open in Notepad, and it should also be completely free of special characters.
• Copy your content from Notepad, and paste it into the page. You should now be able to save the content.