Why are weird or 'foreign' characters appearing in my property description or website page?

When viewing your property online, there are weird/foreign characters in the text, often where punctuation's should be. This is caused from copying a pre typed description from Microsoft Word.

Drafting property descriptions in Microsoft Word is common, however Microsoft Word replaces some web-standard characters with non-standard characters, such as quotation marks, commas and apostrophes. These non-standard characters are not recognised by internet browsers such as Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer, and will appear as 3 or 4 weird characters.

There are a few of things you can do to avoid this problem;

Type your description directly into iDashboard
Typing your description directly into iDashboard will prevent any punctuation from been replaced with any non-standard characters.

Replace punctuation after pasting from Microsoft Word
After pasting your description in from Microsoft Word, go through the description and delete out any punctuation, then using your keyboard place the punctuation's back in.

Disable 'Smart Quotes' in Microsoft Word
You can disable the feature that replaces the web-standard characters with non-standard characters. By doing so, Microsoft Word will not replace the web-standard characters, and you will be free to paste from Microsoft Word without worrying about punctuation;

Microsoft Word 2007

1. On the Office menu, click Word Options.
2. Under the Proofing side tab, click AutoCorrect Options.
3. Under AutoFormat, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box.

Microsoft Word 2003

1. On the Tools menu, click AutoCorrect Options, and then click the AutoFormat As You Type tab.
2. Under Replace as you type, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box.

Microsoft Word is a registered trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. The instructions provided herein are provided as a guide only.