How to Turn Visual Editor on in WordPress

Have you ever had Visual Editor disappear in your WordPress (WP) blog? When you’re editing or adding posts or pages if Visual Editor is available you will see two tabs above the box where you type your posts. One is Visual and the other is HTML.

WordPress Visual Editor

Many WP bloggers probably do not realize there is a setting to make the Visual tab disappear. This can happen when updating WordPress or when collaborating in a WordPress blog with someone who prefers to write html manually.

To turn the Visual Editor back on go to Users (in the left column when you are logged into your blog), click on Your Profile, look for Personal Options and uncheck the box that says Disable the visual editor when writing.

Visual Editor is what provides the options for formatting your posts automatically without knowing how to write html from scratch. The default only shows the first row of options in the Visual Editor.

To reveal or hide the second row click the last icon in the first row. The icon has three lines of dots on it and says Show/Hide Kitchen Sink (Alt+Shift+Z) when you point at it.

The second row contains a drop-down for adding header tags and additional options for formatting text including changing text colors, pasting tools, a remove formatting button, tools for adding media, custom characters, indent, outdent, undo, redo and help.

After you show the Kitchen Sink by clicking on the icon or using the keyboard shortcut Alt + Shift + Z you will see the second row (pictured in the image below):

WordPress Visual Editor Kitchen Sink Options

Those who use word processing programs such as Microsoft Word or the free open source alternative Open Source Word Process I prefer from OpenSource.org will be familiar with most of those options.

Something very useful that you may not be aware of are the buttons for pasting as plain text, paste from Word, and remove formatting.

How to correctly paste from Word or other formatted text into WordPress

If you have ever tried to paste anything from Word directly into WordPress you already know that it can be a mess. It can take longer to clean up the formatting than it would take to write it completely over from scratch!

These little known tools clean up the formatting and allow you to paste content into your WordPress blog. If one option doesn’t work just the way you like try the other one. Most of the time one of these will be just what you needed to turn your Word documents into blog posts.

If the text is not what you want use the remove formatting button to remove the exiting formatting and preserve the content. Then format in WordPress as usual.

My readers may have noticed that I put some information in colorful boxed that stand out in my posts. Have you ever read a long post and said, “yes, that is what I need to do” and then spent far too long skimming the article trying to find the “how-to” among the explanation?

I put the “how-to” parts, specific instructions, or mark a section of a post for reference using these boxes. I do this to make it easy for someone to quickly find the part of each post they need to implement what I am writing about. If you look at what I put in the boxes in this post to see what I mean.

I bring that up in this post because it is a function of the visual editor that allows me to do this quickly and easily. I highlight the selected text and click on the double quote Blockquote icon (Alt+Shift+Q).

The default in the Thesis Theme I used was a gray text. I asked my WordPress Ninja Derek Semmler to edit the CSS for my blogs to make my BlockQuotes more prominent. He edited the text and box color to match the theme of each site.

You can see the Thesis default in our Personalized Gifts blog and compare that to how prominent and beautiful these matching quote boxes are in our Golf Blog and in the Good Millwork blog like this one about mahogany moldings.

For those who know how, unique boxes can be created using CSS styling. If you don’t you can get someone who does to add the code and then you paste it into the html of your posts. That is how the different colored boxes in Good Millwork’s Crown Moldings post were done.

VISUAL EDITOR DISAPPEARS

• Potential Fixes for Missing WordPress Editor

USING WORDPRESS VISUAL EDITOR

• Business Blogging (Ed Bejarana) How to Use the WordPress Visual Editor
• How to Blog at Blogging Teacher (Twitter) Writing Blog Posts Using the Visual Editor
• TysTips WordPress Tips Using the WordPress Visual Editor – Excellent source for newbie bloggers; covers how to write your very first blog post
• Official WordPress Support How to Use Visual Editor
• Blog Wranglers Professional Blog Migration Services How to Change WordPress Font Colors in Visual Editor

HOW TO INSTALL WORDPRESS

• Flame Scorpion (Twitter) How to Quick Install WordPress and Start Your Blog Right Away

Tagged as: wordpress how-to, wordpress kitchen sink, wordpress visual editor, wordpress wysiwyg