Preserve indentations of nested bullet list when copying and pasting to plain text from Word

Question

If I have a nested bulleted list in Word, such as:

When I paste it into Notepad or any other plain text document, the bullets lose their indents:

How can I make the plain text version automatically keep the original spacing / indentations so that I don't need to manually go add spaces?

_{Ideally it would output Markdown like this.}

To clarify: I'm asking how I can set the Copy operation of Word to understand to insert "tab" characters (which are plain text) into the values in the clipboard so that everything looks good when I paste.

As you have learned, your question is susceptible to misinterpretation. Please **[edit] your question** to make it clearer and more complete; people are not going to read the comments *on the answers* to figure out what the question means. — Scott - Слава Україні, Jan 30 '19 at 15:53
@Scott I'm really surprised it needed a clarification, but I edited the question. — Ryan, Jan 30 '19 at 15:55
You need to use a smarter text editor, for example the simple Wordpad. — harrymc, Jan 30 '19 at 16:56
@harrymc I just tried, and that did not work either. When I pasted from Word to WordPad and saved as .txt, the bullets and indents went away. Similarly, when I pasted from Word to WordPad and then copied and pasted from there to Notepad, the bullets and indents went away too. I'm not interested in destination file types of anything other than .txt. — Ryan, Jan 30 '19 at 18:35
You need support for the Rich Text format, which is just not available in `.txt`. If you want to copy the bullets in some other format, you will probably need a VBA macro, and not a simple one. — harrymc, Jan 30 '19 at 19:58

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 18 '19 at 19:15

4

This does not seem possible in Microsoft Word

Open your document in Libreoffice Writer instead. Copy-pasting a list from Writer to a plain text editor keeps the correct indents and bullet points

• Content
    ◦ Nested content
• Content
    ◦ content 2.1
        ▪ content 2.1.1
            • content 2.1.1.1

answered Mar 18 '19 at 19:15

TheLQ

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LibreOffice Writer is the ticket. I want to copy a bulleted list from Google Docs to Scrivener. If I copy from Google Docs and paste it into LibreOffice the bullets are maintained. Then when I copy it from LibreOffice and paste it into Scrivener, the bullets are still there! – Dennis D Jan 29 '23 at 19:04

Preserve indentations of nested bullet list when copying and pasting to plain text from Word

1 Answers1