How Office Handles HTML Documents 

All the major Office applications include a Save As Web Page command that lets you trans­late a file into HTML format and save it locally or publish it to a Web server. In addition, Word allows you to save in Web Page, Filtered format, which generates comparatively clean HTML, at the expense of retaining all formatting information. When you create a document in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access and save it as a Web page, the resulting file uses HTML as a companion format along with the application's native format. (FrontPage, of course, has always used HTML as its native file format.) As a result all your formatting and most features survive the "round trip" from Office application to browser and back; when you open the file for editing, all your formatting and document features survive the round trip.

The requirement for 100% HTML compatibility is so stringent in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and FrontPage that Microsoft has adopted HTML as its primary for­mat for use on the Clipboard. If you copy data from Excel to PowerPoint, for example, the data is translated into HTML as an intermediary format. If you copy anything from a Web browser into one of those Office applications, it should come across completely intact.

HTML compatibility and round-trip capabilities aren't the whole story. If you create a Web page in Word, for example, then you edit the page manually, then open the page and save it again in Word, there is no guarantee that Word will maintain your manual edits (although it leaves tags intact that it doesn't understand). The possibility of Word modifying a handwrit­ten tag can be confusing and frustrating to experienced Web-page designers. Because FrontPage was designed from the ground up as an HTML editor, it does a superb job of maintaining the integrity of tags and edits you construct manually. If you're an experi­enced HTML editor and you want the freedom to edit tags by hand at any time, stick with FrontPage.

Questionnaire:

• How Office handles HTML documents.