HTML entities are showing in the plain text area field result when copy/pasting content from MS Word

I'm working with a rolling form; it's quite lengthy and a number of the fields will be used to pre-populate next year's form just as a number of the fields from last year's form will be used to pre-populate the fields in this year's form.

Last year, I think because my forms were all "plain text" instead of "rich text", many of the entries, once saved, had weird "&amp%" (or something similar) showing up for those people who had first typed out their responses in MS Word and had then cut and paste them into JotForm (to avoid accidental loss of the information, again because the forms are quite long and time-consuming).

The problem was usually with apostrophe's, quotation marks, etc. and I kept getting ask to fix these. Will this problem resolve itself if I use the rich text entry options on the text boxes instead of the plain text option? (I'm assuming it will... if not, however, then my first question is irrelevant because I can just stick with the plain text option).

Yes, that should fixed it because Rich Text is more on HTML formatting. It can parse out HTML entities and display it in the result. If it's giving you another problem, please let us know so we can check and investigate further.

If you want to pass a data from a form to another using Plain Text, you can use this method to encode the formatting, check it here: http://www.jotform.com/help/164-How-to-Pass-Values-to-the-Text-Area-of-a-Form-via-URL-encoding.

Thanks