Moving Between HTML and Office Formats

When Office applications create HTML files, they store the identity of the creating pro­gram in an XML tag at the beginning of the document.

When you open an HTML file in Internet Explorer, the File/Open routine looks for these tags; if it finds one, it adds the originating program's icon to the Internet Explorer toolbar. To begin editing the page, just click that icon, which automatically launches the associated program and loads the document. If you look closely at the icon associated with any Office document, you can easily see the difference between documents saved in the native format and those saved in various HTML and XML formats. A small icon in the upper-left corner identifies the originating

Traditional HTML files are plain-text files; they cannot contain graphics. If you construct a Web page in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Publisher, and the page contains a picture, the application has to store the picture outside the HTML file, and create a link to the picture within the text of the HTML file.

All the Office applications will translate the graphic, if need be, into a GIF or JPEG file, which can be readily viewed on the Web. The rest of the story, however, isn't so simple.

Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access solve the problem using the same elegant (if poten­tially dangerous) way that Windows does when you save a Web page from Internet Explorer: During the Save operation, the program creates a folder with the same name as the file and then copies graphics (and other linked items) to that folder. If you use Word to create a Web page that contains several graphics and then save it using the file name Annual Rcport.htm, Word creates a folder named Annual Report Files, which contains all the graphics from the original page, translated (if necessary) into GIF or JPEG format. You'll find this folder in the same location as the page that contains the file you saved.

Questionnaire:

•   Explain about moving between HTML and Office Formats.