Turning off smart quotes in Word

Microsoft Word usually has "Smart Quotes", sometimes called "curved quotes" or "typographer's quotes", turned on by default. This replaces the more generic straight quote symbols with a matched pair of open and closing quote marks, or a single right quote when used as an apostrophe.

The problem with this is that different versions of Word combined with different versions of operating system (and the default character encoding of the operating system) will result in a variety of different values being used for these curved quotes. If a blog post or other value is "cut" from Word and "pasted" into SailBlogs the system often cannot recognize that a Smart Quote character is supposed to be a quote mark. This usually results in some kind of odd display character in the post (like a question mark), or other error (as in the case of lat/long notation).

Turn off Smart Quotes

If you are using Word to compose entries, the simplest solution is to turn off smart quotes and use the standard characters which are recognized on all systems. In most versions of Word, this is found as part of the Autoformat options:

Format menu -> Autoformat -> Options -> Autoformat As You Type

Uncheck the "straight quotes with smart quotes option" and save the changes.