Rich Text copy&pasting on Office 365 - How is it done?

Question

A colleague of mine recently evaluated SharePoint 2013 via an Office 365 E3 Trial. One of the things he tried was copy&pasting formatted text (including embedded images) from a local Word document into an Enterprise Wiki page - and it basically just worked! Some of the font sizes, paragraph spacings and indentations had to be adjusted but especially the embedded images just worked great without any additional steps required.

At the time we didn't think much about it except "Great, so it seems they finally fixed that." and didn't investigate much further. However, we have now set up our own on-premises SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Server and we are not able to replicate that particular behaviour. Also, the 365-trial has expired so we couldn't go back and see how it was done there.

Online research seems to indicate that the observed functionality is not possible to achieve without third-party products. Neither did I find any indications that Microsoft is pre-installing/-enabling any addons on SharePoint Online instances, especially none by third-parties - but that's not possible given the evidence, right?

Does anyone know how that effect is implemented in SharePoint Online? And can it be done in standalone SharePoint without third-party products? If not, does anyone know which products were used? I'm not looking for product recommendations (I already know about Telerik's Editor or KWizCom's Copy&Paste Manager) - I specifically want to know how it's done in SharePoint Online.

Answer 1

Switching between SharePoint Online (Plan 1) with Yammer and Office 365 Enterprise E3 made no difference. Copied formatted text from Word 2013 was pasted in a new Enterprise Wiki page. Every formatting pasts correct with formatting information. Header 1 in Word is Header 1 in the Enterprise Wiki page, bold is bold, italic is italic and so on. Everything supported on a Wiki Page in terms of formatting will be the same.

Background color of a sentence in Word was copied, but didn’t make it to the Wiki Page. Most likely, because a wiki page does not support it (see the Ribbon). The same goes for the image, which was copied, but didn’t make it to the wiki. Probably because you cannot paste an image, you need to insert an image to the page.

To conclude; this has nothing to do with the subscription model. If you can edit a Wiki Page, then you have permission to past formatted text as well.

SharePoint On Premise?

On SharePoint Server things work a little different. Background color follows and the image definition, but not the actual image. I got the following result upon pasting the image (the siteicon):

Even if I added the image to publishing images before pasting, it made no difference. No image - just the above outline.