Salesforce Rich Text Fields -- Problem Solved

I had an interesting problem this morning. An account rep had a small table in MS/Word that he wanted to pasted into a Salesforce rich text field.

Big Problem: Though the table was small all of the style crap added by MS/Word exceed the columns' 32,000 character limit for rich text fields. You think this would be an easy problem to solve?

Here is what I had to do:

First attempt: 
I saved the MS/Word as filtered HTML – too big.

Second attempt: 
I used CKEditor to create new html – too big.

Third attempt: 
I hand crafted the HTML, visualized it in Chrome, and then did a copy/paste from Chrome to SFDC – still too big. The SFDC gadget transformed my short HTML into something bigger than 32K. Odd behavior – SFDC sandbox worked; production SFDC did not. They must be updating the SFDC gadget in Winter’11.

 Final attempt:
 I wrote a one-line sqlforce UPDATE statement and patched the field. Finally, success.

• UPDATE Quote SET SpecialInstructions__c='....' WHERE id='00a88789a7s89af'

I love sqlforce.